Back to Benedict

It was probably Lent of 1980 when I first visited a Benedictine Abbey. My friend in South Carolina, June Reynolds, was an oblate of St Anselm's Abbey in Washington DC, and I was studying at Oxford. She stayed in touch with me and suggested in a letter that I might like to visit a Benedictine Abbey and that Douai Abbey in Berkshire seemed to be the closest to Oxford.



She didn't know that for those of us brought up as fundamentalists monks and nuns were one of the deep dark secrets of the Catholic Church! We were told that they were (shock horror!!) celibate, and that their monasteries and convents were connected by secret underground tunnels where the monks and nuns met--and not for prayer meetings-- The bodies of the babies born to the nuns were buried there, for the Mother Superior would first baptize them and then strangle them so they would go straight to heaven...



I'm not kidding. That's the sort of stuff we were told. Anyway, I didn't believe it, but I still had a pretty big dose of skepticism and curiosity as I made my way by train to the little station at Woolhampton, climbed off the train and hiked the couple of miles up the hill to Douai. I was given the usual warm Benedictine welcome and made friends with an American who had just entered the novitiate there. Dom Elias Polomski is still a friend after all these years. He ended as an Anglican priest before returning to the Catholic Church. I became an Anglican priest and almost a monk before marrying and ending up as a Catholic priest.



I made a short retreat there during Lent, and was hooked. The monks seemed to take their faith seriously, but did not take themselves seriously, and that seemed to suit me. Over the years I would come to visit many different abbeys in many different countries, and always found the same consistent, stable and peaceful life.



The Way of St Benedict has been a solid and sure path first into, and then through the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church is vast, and it's not a bad idea to have a smaller sub set within the Church to belong to. In the Benedictine world I found kindred spirits--other men who liked books, being quiet and trying to love God. Someone asked me why I didn't end up as a monk myself, and I said that for me it would have been too easy.



"What, you mean I get a room all to myself. I can worship in a great big beautiful church five times a day, have access to a big library where I am actually supposed to sit and read? You mean I can live simply and there will be other people who actually also consider small talk to be boring, and who will either discuss interesting topics or keep quiet? You mean I can live in a big rambling old place in the country with large rooms with high ceilings and worn out leather armchairs--and that I will share this space with other men who will wish me well, but mind their own business?" Sounds like bliss.



Of course, the monastic path would not have been any easier or harder than any path to holiness. God wants to knock the rough edges off us no matter which life we choose, and he will fashion us into saints through whatever path we take if we will only co operate with him.



So, once again I'm back with Benedict. For three days I will stay here with the monks my brothers, and wish in a way that I had chosen the simple and beautiful monastic path, and then I will know that it was not my way--even though I will always find it elusive and alluring, and I will stop and realize that the drawing I feel is not just the beauty of the Benedictine life, but that this life reveals a greater beauty and reflects a deeper Truth, and it is this beauty, this truth, this Life that is the greater drawing.