When W. Paul Jones discovered a frozen baby bird on his windowsill one frosty morning, the scene struck an emotional chord. Haunted by feelings of abandonment and failure all his life, Jones's search for God had led him from social activist to contemplative, from marriage to singlehood, from the world of academia to a life of solitude among the poor. In the candid manner of Kathleen Norris's Cloister Walk, Jones recounts his "strange and wild" spiritual journey in Teaching the Dead Bird to Sing: Living the Hermit Life Without and Within.

"Thirty years ago, God began tearing apart my plan for the rest of my life," Jones writes. It was 1971, and Jones, a self-proclaimed "persistent social radical" who had started his own commune in the inner city, wanted to know if the Church had communes other than the "Jesus freak" places he had visited. A friend suggested that he visit a nearby Trappist monastery.

After three days at a Trappist monastery, Jones decided to abandon his successful teaching career to take a nine-month monastic sabbatical. "For reasons that I am still attempting to discern," Jones writes, "I felt driven to enter my own frozen springtime. . . to perch on some lonely sill, with only myself for companionship . . . perhaps to be discovered by One capable of teaching me to sing an untimely song in an unlikely place."

Teaching the Dead Bird to Sing is based on a journal that Jones kept during his first foray into monastic life. He describes the intensely spiritual experience of building his hermitage out of scrap lumber, his daily struggles with feelings of loneliness and vulnerability, and the eventual inner peace that he attained.

While Jones was initially reluctant to publish his journal, his years of serving as a spiritual director convinced him that his writings would resonate with other spiritual seekers. "The life most of us live is a lonely one," he writes, "wandering through our own wildernesses, eager to find a traveling companion with whom we can be vulnerable together."

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