Here are two of the 20 questions that are so connected, they really have to be answered together:

How many siblings do you have? What is your birth order in the family?

That could be a complicated question in a larger family than mine. But, it’s just me and my brother Paul. Let’s do the number part first. He’s three years younger than me, although four years behind me in school (as a small child he started to talk later than normal, so my parents opted to keep him home for an additional year). Oddly, that meant that we were pretty much never in the same school building at the same time—even in college when he began at Lycoming the semester after I graduated.

My brother is a Benedictine monk—not a priest, but a brother. He entered religious life several years before I went to seminary. He’s spent around 40 years at the Abbey Notre Dame in Fontgombault, France. They are a very cloistered community. Their primary work is, as it is for every Benedictine community, to sing the sacred liturgy. (If you’re curious, their chant recordings are available in the United States through Clear Creek Abbey in Oklahoma—one of their daughter foundations.)