Eager to shake off the indelible brand of a Catholic upbringing, Patricia Hample seeks the "old world" of Catholicism. On her pilgrimage, she meets other seekers--crotchety English agnostics, American Franciscan friars and nuns, and the seekers that fill every charter flight. Inevitably, too, she finds the "old world" right at home, in the very past, she had tried to escape. But what she is looking for confronts her, finally, on a retreat at a monastery near the Lost Coast of northern California in the still, virgin moments of silent prayer...