Within about three months, however, I began to experience a conflict between this fascinating brush with monastic life and a deeper commitment: full participation in the life of my local parish in Beverly, St. Mary Star of the Sea<\/a>. I have a habit of overcommitting myself, and boy, was I ever! I had begun attending meetings of Communion and Liberation<\/a> at the St. Mary\u2019s rectory on Friday evenings. When Eucharistic Adoration<\/a> was instituted that summer of 2008, I signed up for one hour a day, five days a week. Then I volunteered to start a parish newsletter\u2014either before or after I agreed to be a lector. I joked to Father Barnes <\/a>that I was like his dog, a puppy named Finbar, who was dashing around the rectory yard eating everything. Flushed with the excitement of being a Catholic, I was madly snapping up everything in sight.\u00a0 <\/p>\n Sobered by my own drunkenness, I withdrew from my commitments to the abbey, intent on giving my best to St. Mary\u2019s in Beverly. This is the parish Katie<\/a> grew up in. Moreover, it is literally across the street from our publishing office. In significant ways, St. Mary\u2019s is the spiritual heart of Beverly. And my confidence in Father Barnes as pastor and guide was growing by the week. It made sense to put my eggs in this one basket, and I have never regretted the decision, although I still miss the abbey.<\/p>\n At about this time, I began reading An Infinity of Little Hours<\/a>, <\/i>which I bought at the Glastonbury Abbey bookshop on one of my last Sundays there. The subtitle explains the content: Five Young Men and Their Trial of Faith in the Western World\u2019s Most Austere Monastic Order. <\/i>The order is the Carthusians; the monastery in question is Parkminster,\u00a0 the only Carthusian house, or charterhouse, in present-day England (check out the high-tech Web site<\/a>); and the five young men are novices\u2014three Americans, an Irishman, and a German\u2014who entered in 1960. Early in the book the author writes that of the five only one became a fully professed Carthusian following the mandatory five-year trial period. This injects an element of suspense into the reading: Who will it be and why? Or conversely who will fail to make the grade and why?<\/p>\n The Carthusians are the Navy Seals of monasticism, except that once fully professed, they are enlisted forever. They effectively live in individual hermitages around a central courtyard and only emerge in silence two or three times a day for mass, prayer, and occasional meals taken in community. Their \u201cmajor work,\u201d according to the author, is Night Office, said between 11 pm and 2 am. The Monks feel \u201cthe special responsibility of being awake when everyone else is asleep.\u201d Which means, of course, that they don\u2019t get as much sleep as you or I. Once a week, they take a walk together, known as spatiamentum, <\/i>promenading two by two through the countryside and changing partners on command every five minutes so that they do not become too attached. They are never to make eye contact with one another. Carthusians do not minister to the surrounding community; they do no missionary work; Carthusians pray. Their motto is Soli Deo, <\/i>God alone. They wear hair shirts. They take cold-water baths (or did until recent changes). From September 14 (The Exaltation of the Cross) until Easter, except Sundays and feast days, they undertake \u201cthe great monastic fast,\u201d one meal a day and a pretty sparse meal at that. For lent, they also give up dairy products. And on and on. <\/p>\n The author is a woman, Nancy Klein Maguire. Given that women cannot enter a Carthusian monastery under any circumstances, <\/i>you\u2019d think Maguire must have had three strikes against her before even starting to write. But she had an ace up her sleeve: her husband is a former Carthusian novice attached to Parkminster. In fact, if you put two and two together, it seems that she is married to one of the four 1960 novices who didn\u2019t make the cut. Dave, or Dom Philip, as he is known in the book, \u201chad weighed the difficulty of solitude before he came to the Charterhouse. He had not weighed the difficulty of the other monks.\u201d What drives Dom Philip out finally is the horrible singing of his fellow monks in choir. In Maguire\u2019s on-line biography<\/a>, her husband is described as \u201can ex-Carthusian monk, who hadn\u2019t minded hair shirts, sleepless nights, 48-hour fasts, and total solitude, but who couldn\u2019t tolerate the monks singing off pitch during the Divine Office.\u201d<\/p>\n The meaning of the cell to a Carthusian is, Get to God or get out. Dom Philip did just that, as did three of\u00a0 the other four. One found that he was a homosexual and decided to live an openly gay life outside the cloister. Another was so severe with fasting and penances that he all but went crazy as a monk. I forget now the other reason for leaving. <\/p>\n Maguire\u2019s description of life in a charterhouse is so vivid, you can feel the cold damp of the cell and the rude comfort of a coarse sheet and blanket on a lonely bed. You can feel the hunger pangs from mid-September until Easter. You can feel the terrible loneliness. I was not cut out to be a Navy Seal, and now I know that I was not cut out to be a Carthusian, or perhaps any kind of monk. Number one reason? Other than celibacy, it has to be the hair shirt. When I was a boy, I had to wear wool pants to church one hour per week, and it nearly drove me buggy. I itched so much I cried. I begged my mother to get me cotton pants. A hair shirt, for this pampered guy, would be a lifelong torture.<\/p>\n So what is it about monastic life that attracted me and attracts me still? What is it that attracted Dad? It is the silence, the chance to bring the rest of life to stillness and \u201cknow that I am God.\u201d Next month I am going on a four-day retreat with two friends at St. Joseph\u2019s Abbey<\/a>, a Cistercian monastery in Spencer, Massachusetts\u2014another brush with monastic living. I\u2019m sure I\u2019ll come home with new impressions. Maybe I\u2019ll even report on them. But one thing I know for certain: I\u2019m coming home.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/_dmDaLWNETzg\/StE0On2aM_I\/AAAAAAAAAVw\/GvZK_Xqa7JE\/s320\/InfinityHours\")
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