Why I was expelled....

25 kilometres south-west of Brussels

I didn’t want to continue that conversation yesterday on ЖЖ. It was sunny and still hot. It was my last chance to go walking in the country before leaving for Russia next Friday. But my wife asked me to, so OK... The conversation was about vocation. I was not in the mood, but did my best

I still went off into the country. Driving out of Brussels, all of a sudden I was struck between the eyes by what is possibly the best explanation yet of why the good Lord had let me be thrown out of a monastery 25 years before.

I entered a French Benedictine monastery in my early 30s, believing I had a vocation to the monastic life, with the priesthood thrown in.  All went fine for the first year, then it all unravelled and I was asked a year later by the novice master (a man I felt I could not trust at a deep, spiritual level),  to leave. As he was expected to become the next abbot, it was no use protesting. (He left two years later, just after I got married, after getting too close to the abbess of the women's monastery next door).

Leaving the monastery was worse than a divorce (which I have also been through). The bitterness took a long time to get out of my system. The 'why Lord?' question remained for years...

 

12-century ‘sedes sapientiae’ at Ittre

What suddenly struck me yesterday was that, very simply, if I had stayed at that particular monastery I would not have been be tested enough. I would be better tested ‘in the world’. In the words of the Epistle to St Peter in the 1960 New English Bible (theologically wayward at times but brilliant as a translation): ‘This is cause for great joy, even though now you smart for a little while, if need be, under trials of many kinds. Even gold passes through the assayer's fire, and more precious than perishable gold is faith which has stood the test’.

I hope that this is not prelest, but simply the assayer’s fire in that monastery (and IMHO in most Benedictine monasteries of the time) was not hot enough.