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A Death at the Abbey

New York writer Inigo Thomas describes at length a visit to Pluscarden Abbey. "In corporations, it is not uncommon for people who work together for years to have little, if any, idea of who their colleagues are besides being colleagues. The suppression of self is how many offices function, and an office environment is most brutally corporate when selves are harshly suppressed, and when that suppression is harshly enforced. It's hardly a surprise that, in these conditions, paranoia and power play are often overwhelming, much of it predicated on not knowing what anyone else is going to do, because you don't know who these people really are.

Yet at a monastery, where monks live among one another, often for decades, that you would know nothing about a man's life prior to his becoming a monk until the day he died seems astonishing to anyone who is not a monk. On joining a monastic order, a monk writes his vita; it is a form of confession that is handed to the abbot, who will never reveal its contents. Thereafter, that earlier life is considered entirely irrelevant. The Rule of St. Benedict says expressly that to talk about others, never mind gossip, is devil talk."

Full feature at Slate.