The psalms are the main prayers for a Christian monk. Most of them are about vice and virtue and fear and praise. One day after I had said some of these prayers, I got to thinking about vice and virtue. How easy it was for men and women to be tempted. As Oscar Wilde once said, “I can resist anything but temptation!”. How easily we give way to our desires and passions and greed. All those ways that wind up making us discontent and unhappy. Yet, we all look for happiness and almost all of us want to be considered “good”.

A Village of Vice or Virtue?

What would happen, I thought, if a whole village had to be good all the time? What if they had to resist passions and desires? I imagined such a place and such a story and this is how I started writing about the village of Banios-by-the-Angel.

Here, God wanted everyone to be full of virtue and goodness, in spite of what he should have learned about men and women, starting with Adam and Eve.The Devil tried to get the people of Banios to give in to temptations of the flesh, of money and of all the other vices which seem to rule so much of our lives. It was a tough time for the people and a time of frustration for the Devil as he kept trying to seduce the people. No one knows what God thought except that his angel hovered around the village watching over a fight between the temptations of this world and the heavenly commands of the next. Here was the concept of my story of Banios.

Co-create with me in Banios-by-the-Angel

I wanted to share this story as I was writing it, so that you could participate in its creation. Sometimes you may like what I write. Sometimes not. Sometimes I will go back and make changes because of what you have said. Other times I will not.

But what I will do all the time is to carefully consider what you, the reader, have said about the story of Banios. Your comments are vital.

Please come and join me and the people of Banios. Learn about what happened to them. Be part of their history. By joining me you make all of it happen. You make Banios become a village alive with history—a happy and old-fashioned but worried people awakening to God and the Devil. Give them and me the courage to persist, to finish what we started high up in those French mountains. Tell me what you think. Every comment you make helps—whether positive or not.

Join me and be part of the story of The Cloud of Goodness.