Sunday’s open house at the Magnolia Monastery turned into a happening. If someone had asked me just who I might have expected to see when I went there, I’d have been at a loss.

But no sooner had I pulled into the parking area than I spotted Anne Davis. When she recognized that I was in the car beside her, she laughed, sharing our inside joke of running into each other at a variety of unexpected places between here and New Orleans. With Anne were Kay King and Anne Pointer Kennedy.

And so it went. There were Briggs and Dot Smith and Sarah Dell Gray; over yonder were John and Irene Rhodes. Here came Jo Blair and Linda Mitchell.

There were others, of course, from out-of-town. We learned who they were as each person stated his or her name and perhaps a bit of information about how or why they had come.

In walked Billie Lois and Tommy Marshall. So did Arthur and Ollie Battle along with their daughter Olivia. Lent and Linda Thomas walked in. So did Rosa Pettit and her niece, Carrah.

Still I recognized more local faces than I can now recall. And among them were new faces from Oxford, Clarksdale and Memphis, including Vietnamese who are second (now even perhaps third?) generation citizens whose visits to the monastery enrich cultural ties to their homeland.

There were stories as well. The Holloway family told how they were contacted by the monastics who were seeking manure to enrich their gardens. Somehow, Iris Holloway said, when they did a Google search, they found the name of the nearby Bob Holloway farm and contacted them. They were somewhat puzzled, Iris continued, about the association of their name and manure, but the monastics’ inquiry turned into a mutually beneficial arrangement and friendship.

Brother Phap Khong said that his name represented an emptiness of things, a name that his teacher had given him during his early months of study and meditation. Brother Phap Khong is among the senior members of the community at the monastery. He fled Vietnam in 1975 during the fall of Saigon, he said.

“I jumped on a boat on the last night,” he said.

The refugee who would become a monastic joined thousands of others fleeing the communist takeover, moving from one refugee encampment to another at the whim of the host country.

Bro. Phap Khong finally reached the United States, where he entered college and eventually settled in Philadelphia and became a banker, he continued. He has now been a monk for eight years. He said that the suffering that so many Vietnamese people endured during and after the war and as refugees may have increased interest in the mindfulness and living in the moment that monastics practice.

 After a short slide show in the meditation hall that ended with questions from visitors and answers from monastics, guests were ushered outside to large tables brimming with colorful vegan fare — dishes so tasty that I have asked Sister Boi Ngheim for recipes to share with readers.

The meal was followed by the stick games which you will find photographed elsewhere in this edition, as well as volleyball.

The interest among local people in a Buddhist monastery on Red Hill, Mississippi stems partly from curiosity about the ancient system’s practices and beliefs but also from a curiosity about the Vietnamese people and their culture. I’m not sure the two can be separated.