Where it all began

A little early Throwback Thursday action, for those of you who follow such things…

The picture below is Your Humble Blogger in April of 2002 with Dom Bernardo Olivera, at the time the Abbot General of the Order of the Cistercians of the Strict Observance (O.C.S.O.), commonly known as Trappists.  We met each other at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia, where I was one of the facilitators for an international gathering of Lay Cistercians (a kind of Third Order). I was discerning joining the group. But God had other plans.

One of the Lay Cistercians I met turned out to be the first deacon I’d ever met: Wayne Bodkin, an ebullient Brit living in France. I heard him preach during one of the Masses, and the Holy Spirit just beat me senseless. “That’s what you should be doing,” he said, not too subtly, while thumping my head with his wings.

Here’s Wayne and his wife.

I flew back to New York and applied for the diaconate program a few weeks later. I began formation that fall. And here I am.

Another key player in this chapter of my life is the great writer and priest and friend Fr. James Stephen Behrens, whose spiritual essays first drew me to attend a retreat in Conyers. He remains a beacon, lighting the way.