How Making Cheese Shows Us How to Live a Life Worth Living

I was utterly captivated watching Sister Noella, a Benedictine nun, make cheese in episode four, “Earth,” of Michael Pollan’s documentary “Cooked.” I felt a profound resonance with how she described her faith’s engagement with the world and celebration of creation in all the small daily details of being present. How work becomes a sublime act of celebrating God’s creative force. It just felt right and true to me, and not dissimilar to my own view of faith and practice expressed through my daily Buddhist practice.

The whole cosmos is a single ongoing act of reality. Not a thing. Not a being. An act. Buddhism calls it Dharmakaya. Christianity calls it God. Both words, when stripped of their cultural furniture, point at the same irreducible fact: the ground of existence is not a noun but a verb, not a static presence but a continuous becoming, without beginning or end. The mystics of both traditions have always known this. The theologians tend to forget it.

This piece is not an argument that all religions are the same. They are not. Doctrine differs, history differs, practice differs, and those differences matter to those who subscribe to them.

What I believe all traditions can share is their orientation: a turning toward the way things are, and a commitment to living from that turning.

So, in this piece, inspired by watching the documentary, I will focus on how two traditions, Benedictine Catholicism and Nichiren Buddhism, for all their surface differences, share that orientation with a precision that goes well beyond coincidence. They share a grammar. And they can stand as an example for intra-faith dialogue, respect, and communication.

Liturgy as the Daily Spine

Both traditions use the word liturgy in the same way. Liturgy is not casual practice. It is a structured, repeated, communally obligated devotional engagement with the ground of reality, performed whether you feel like it or not, because the feelings are not the point. The Benedictine Divine Office orders the day into seven periods of prayer, anchoring every hour in attentiveness. Nichiren practice orders the day through Gongyo, the morning and evening recitation of the Lotus Sutra, with its sacred title. In both cases the liturgy is not preparation for something else. It is the practice itself, the spine around which a life is organized.

Sister Noella Marcellino, the microbiologist nun at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Connecticut, makes cheese by hand using centuries-old methods, including wooden barrels that health inspectors once ordered her to abandon. When she switched to stainless steel, contamination increased. The wood itself carried the intelligence. Liturgy works the same way. The form is not arbitrary. The repetition is not rote. Something lives in the structure that cannot be extracted from it.

Work as Practice

The Benedictine motto ora et labora (pray and work) is not a scheduled obligation. It is a philosophical statement that there is no meaningful distinction between sacred and ordinary activity. The sacred and the profane are the same thing. The monastic who tends the garden and the monastic who chants the Office are doing the same thing. The quality of attention is the practice. Sister Noella found that meaning in making cheese, choosing the ancient wooden barrels not despite their earthiness but because of it, staying as close to the ground of creation as her craft allowed.

Nichiren’s teaching makes a similar claim. The Lotus Sutra is not a text about leaving the world for enlightenment. It is a text asserting that Buddha-nature is present in the world as it is, manifest in the smallest details of daily life. Nichiren makes this explicit in a letter to a lay disciple: “If you continue living as you are now, there can be no doubt that you will be practicing the Lotus Sutra twenty-four hours a day. Regard your service to your lord as the practice of the Lotus Sutra. This is what is meant by ‘No worldly affairs of life or work are ever contrary to the true reality.’” (WND-1, “Reply to a Believer,” pp. 905-906.) What matters is not the grandeur of the activity but the quality of the engagement. Making the meal, cleaning the floor, raising the child: these are not interruptions of practice. They are where practice lives.

Attainment as Orientation, Not Destination

Both traditions resist the idea that practice is a ladder you climb until you arrive somewhere and can stop climbing. The Benedictine vow of conversatio morum (ongoing conversion of life) is a commitment to continuous transformation without a fixed endpoint. There is no moment at which the monastic has converted enough. The Nichiren understanding of awakening runs parallel: neither Sudden nor Gradual alone captures it, because even genuine awakening is subject to entropy. Practice is not the path to a permanent destination. It is a continuous returning to the ground that was always already there.

This is not pessimism. It is precision. The returning is not failure. It is the practice.

Stability as the Container

The Benedictine vow of stabilitas loci (stability of place) is a commitment to remain with one community through difficulty, boredom, conflict, and the long seasons when nothing seems to be happening. It is a refusal of the spiritual consumer’s habit of moving on when a tradition stops being interesting. Nichiren practice carries the same demand. Nichiren himself wrote from exile, through persecution, and in the face of repeated institutional opposition, never abandoning his community or his practice. Daily liturgy in ordinary life, without retreat conditions, without the drama of peak experience, year after year in the same household, with the same people. The container has to hold. Without stability, depth is not possible.

What Arises from the Work

Buddhism speaks of 84,000 teachings. The number is not a doctrinal catalog. It is an analogy: there are 84,000 teachings because there are 84,000 people, each requiring the teaching that fits the shape of their life and understanding. Benedictine practice and Nichiren practice are two of the 84,000. They look different because they are meant for different people in different times and places. What they share is not doctrine but a shared orientation toward the ground of reality, whether called Dharmakaya or God, honoring the ongoing action of creation, the ground of everything. Sister Noella’s cheese, made with attention and fidelity to ancient form, is one of the 84,000 too. Nichiren captures the relationship between practice and daily life in a single image: “When the skies are clear, the ground is illuminated. Similarly, when one knows the Lotus Sutra, one understands the meaning of all worldly affairs.” (WND-1, “The Object of Devotion for Observing the Mind,” p. 376.)

And that ground is not reserved for monastics or temples. It surfaces anywhere a human being brings full attention to the act of creation. In the gardener reading the soil. In the painter in the moment before the brush touches the canvas. In the cook who has made the same dish a thousand times and is somehow making it for the first time. In the person who sweeps the floor the way it deserves to be swept. These are not metaphors for spiritual practice. They are spiritual practice. The divine, by whatever name, is present wherever something new arises from the work.

I am drawn to these two traditions in particular. That’s just me. They feel true to me, and align with my own internal sense of rightness and integrity. That is, itself, a kind of teaching.