Monastic Laundry

 [Housekeeping note: no post here next week. Check back again on Wednesday, November 11th.] By this point of my life, 18 years old, I knew. I knew the one thing I started dreading in 7th grade and began to slightly accept by 9th grade was not ever going away. I knew I wasn't into girls. The thing is (don't laugh), by choosing to live a life of chastity, I honestly thought about it more in terms of giving up the females I wasn't into rather than the males I was into. A life with no heterosexual love? Pfft. I can do that. I know this seems illogical, but doing anything with another guy was an impossibility anyway, as far as I was concerned. This was the early 90s, and things were extremely different (and much more difficult) back then. As a thoroughly naive teenager who up until that point assumed his homosexual leanings would either disappear on their own or at least agree to stay bottled up inside him forever and ever, the stubborn yearnings of my libido genuinely took m

I come from a very large family, so moving into a household with 33 other people wasn't as big a jump as it would be for some others. Even so, being physically away from everyone all of a sudden, with several layers of communication silence stacked up between us as well, was not easy to get used to. Here are a few examples of the ways my family and friends acknowledged this wall that went up between us. Remember, this was before email, so I sent and received many actual letters back then instead. The dates you see are the date they wrote the letter, not the date I received it. July 2, 1993 letter from my mother:    Three days have passed since you entered your new life, and I'm so anxious to hear from you. Are you adjusting to your new schedule and chores? Daddy and I were very impressed with the residence and residents. I was telling everybody about some of the rooms--yours, the parlor with parrot and cockatiels, the dining room, and of course the beautifully large living roo

Okay. So put yourself in my shiny black shoes for a moment here. You're only 18 years old, and you've made what we can all agree is a monumental decision about the rest of your life, a commitment that means giving up almost everything you knew before in service to the church you love. You've learned about the place you now live and you've met all the men with whom you'll be sharing coffee every day for the rest of your life, you've gotten used to the schedule and accepted the realities of poverty, chastity, and obedience too, at least in so much as you can understand them all at this point in time. And then, very slowly, things start to change. It's now the fall of 1993, and you've started school at Manhattan College in the Bronx. You and four other young brothers drive up there each day after morning prayer, mass, and breakfast with the community. School runs from roughly 9 AM until after 4, when you all meet at the red caravan in the parking lot for

This blog has been on hiatus since March, but I'm delighted to relaunch it here with the below reflections from my first year as Brother Sean. One quick clarification before I go on. Because I only lived in a monastery for four years, and because I am no longer a practicing Catholic, it's entirely possible there are people out there who see me as using the church to boost my résumé and my ego. This is a completely fair but untrue assertion. I celebrate my four years as a monk because my time and experience there hurt me so very deeply. While this may sound like a completely illogical and contradictory statement, the truth is simply this: I learned and grew as both a human and a soul more in those four years than in any other four years before or since, and though some of it was quite painful--unnecessarily so--I am extremely grateful for all the good that came of it, and the good people I got to know and live with as well! If anyone out there thinks I'm just puffing myself