Monastery tour a few Saturdays ago.

After the political campaigning and before grocery shopping, I went for dinner and the divine office at a local monastery near my house through a tour arranged by the conservative-leaning Catholic academic group on campus.

They’ve had these tours for several years and I’ve always wanted to go, but this was the first time that I was finally able to make it.

About eight undergrads and two early-stage grad students came, and most of the undergrads looked drawn and nervous, and the early-stage grad students were bearded (white) male converts in philosophic and historical fields where Roman Catholicism was important.

Also, one of the undergrads wore a long navy blue skirt and had big glasses and a large black lace mantilla wrapped around her head, and she knelt and kissed the floor of the church before a picture of the Virgin Mary right when we all walked in.

(She also later dropped that she had been in a monastery for a year, but now wasn’t.)

Oddly enough, during dinner, the prior mentioned a former newspaper religion writer who wrote a great spiritual article reflecting on workaholism, and then he mentioned the name of the guy who was a communications director who I had to deal with in reporting and who I mentioned by name in a couple of my articles as a representative example of a holder of a job position that should be eliminated due to its perverse duties.

“I don’t know what happened to him,” the prior was like, and at that I began smiling and laughing just a bit, which he noticed.

“Oh, do you know?”, he was like.

“Well,” I was like, “I do investigative reporting into higher education, and he ended up in that sector, and I’ve actually had to deal with him quite a bit when I was doing work on a couple of articles.”

Then, I paused for just the briefest of beats and was like, “I think he got into it because he needed more money for his family, but from what I can tell, he’s been engaging in a lot of unethical behavior and has fallen deeply into sin.”

At that, all of the undergrads’ eyes just got wide and they all just looked at me like “Who is this?”, but the prior seemed pained and right away was like, “I’ll remember to pray for him.”

He really meant that, too.  I had mixed feelings about the prior since he seemed like a virile aesthetic (white) (male) convert in his late 40s, but he had the right reaction when confronted with a very odd situation, which makes me predisposed to like him now.

He also mentioned he was originally from northwoods Wisconsin, which doesn’t hurt.