(52) The Malcontent

"My monastic Odyssey is not quite [an] edifying tale...I was
even as a boy, the sort of person who hid in a barrel and ate
green apples, as a man, the sort of official who quickly became
first mate and thought of mutiny. It has been my fate to stumble
constantly into the wrong camp; my life has been a continuous
political campaign, full of chaos and muddle."
[Dom Fabian Glencross, "Monastic Malcontent," a contribution
in A TOUCH OF GOD: EIGHT MONASTIC JOURNEYS,
Maria Boulding (editor), St. Bede's Publications, 1970, p.137.]

Comment: I can empathize with the late Dom Fabian, a British
monk affiliated first with Downside and later with its spin-off,
Worth Abbey. He died in Peru, where Benedictines were yet
establishing a house in the "Third World."

Continuing, Dom Fabian put: "I am going to step into this world
and leave the rest behind...I have taken off my sixteenth-century
monastic costume because I cannot meet poor men, ordinary
men in a real world, dressed like a sober character in *Star Wars;*
ordinary Christians deserve to be treated with greater courtesy
and consideration. I find more and more that the people I came
to help know more about humility in the face of adversity,
about courage and self-discipline amid real personal difficulty,
than I have..."
[Ibid, p. 151.]

Just pondering, but maybe this malcontent monk might be the
face of the Benedictine future as it moves beyond the walls,
out into the world. Dom Fabian was an honest man, who did
not worship the forms but rather worked and lived in the *Real.*