The Transformation Theme

Extract

We have already considered William’s eleventh meditation as a sort of examination of conscience, designed to enlighten him about his major problem, namely his vocation. One cannot help feeling that he went on thinking about it for too long, since the passage in question recalls something he had written probably ten years earlier, in his ‘Nature and Dignity of Love’. Between the ages of about thirty-five and forty-five, he seems to have been thoroughly bugged by the noonday devil, and there were still five years to go before he was finally to make up his mind and transfer to the Cistercians at Signy. The big problem was one of responsibility, for he felt a failure as a superior, and even more than that, he felt it was stupid that he of all people should be in charge of a monastery, when all he wanted was peace and quiet. The fault, naturally, was with those who had put him there.

In the Nature and Dignity of Love, he had written . . . ‘In this school (the monastery, his schola charitatis), those who are tired by their journey lose nothing by taking a rest: neither did the two hundred of David’s men who were so spent that they could not cross the brook at Besor (I Samuel, 30, 9). If anyone will sit and “tarry with the stuff”, as these did ... if anyone sits by the baggage and faithfully guards it, he will hardly be worse off than his companions who go on ahead and win the victory, for he shall have an even share of the spoil’.