This holiday season l'm thinking, again, about the sisters at Our Lady of the Mississippi Abbey, near Dubuque, Iowa. The sisters make and sell caramels (vanilla-, chocolate-, and honey-flavored, as well as chocolate-covered), and I send the sisters' caramels to friends and relatives for Christmas presents despite the obvious objections: I know there is an overabundance of Christmas candy as it is; I know most of us have a perennial concern with our waistlines. 

Still, I give the sisters' caramels anyway, because they're easy to mail, yet they're tangible (unlike, say, a gift certificate), and they don't last forever so my friends aren't stuck with some odd knickknack they don't like. I give the sisters' caramels because it's impossible to know what to buy for everyone, though the things all of us want—love, compassion, community; a shield against disease, misfortune, mortality—are identifiable enough. But these things are in short supply, or impossible to give, or both; and because I can't give what I'd like, I give the sisters' caramels—in short, for religious reasons. 

I've never spoken with any of the sisters (I could, I suppose; abbey rules governing speech were liberalized in the late seventies), and what little I know about their abbey I read in a forty-eight-page booklet they sent me with last year's candy order. The sisters are Cistercians of the Strict Observance (also known as Trappistines), and Our Lady of the Mississippi Abbey was founded in 1964, by nuns from the Abbey of Mount Saint Mary's, who established the daughter house because of overcrowding at their home convent, in Wrentham, Massachusetts. The Trappistines are the result of seventeenth-century reforms of the Cistercian Order that reestablished monastic silence, manual labor, and asceticism, and, while rules governing Trappistine abbeys have undergone gradual changes since these reforms, the emphasis on a balance between prayer, spiritual study, and manual labor remains central to Cistercian life. The sisters' work making caramels, therefore, is as much about their spiritual relationship with the physical world—a sacramental relationship that recognizes a world infused with God's grace—as it is about economic necessity. 

The sisters are more modernized than you might expect; they have a fax machine and a computer, they take credit cards, and they offer discounts on orders of twelve or more boxes of candy shipped to the same address (I assume the abbey has a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy on gluttony). But the sisters' prices have a quaint, out-of-it charm—$7.80 for a box of honey caramels, $10.40 for the chocolate-covered—and when I give their candy I can't help but feel I'm giving a piece of a simpler, purer way of living in the world. 

I am not Catholic, not a member of any organized religion, but that doesn't mean I think I'm too good for one, nor that I think I'm above those who profess religious beliefs. I do not view religion with disdain; in fact, I am suspicious of people who are antireligious, though they're good sorts, generally—broad-minded, tolerant—who, nonetheless, seem to abandon their usual openness to possibility and adopt an almost fundamentalist literalism in the face of religious questions. "Coincidence," they say. "It's simple. There is no bigger picture." When I give the sisters' caramels, then, I think I'm trying to give the hope that the sisters' lives hold out for me: that it might be possible to find transcendence in the world, that maybe there is more to life than world-weariness and cynicism. 

I can't give hope, of course (who can? who wouldn't if they could?), but when my friends and loved ones call, or send their thank you notes, I will hope that maybe they're thanking me for more than caramels. I'll hope they're thanking me, actually, for the example of the sisters' lives—their faith in a created world, and in something larger than themselves. I'll hope that maybe my friends and loved ones will be lucky, as I have been, and, in the sisters' faith, find hope, or, at least, find more than candy in the box.