A US-based Cistercian monk has penned a novel based on daily monastery life, offering a story of an older monk reflecting on the joys and challenges of his life. Source: Texas Catholic.
One muggy afternoon on the Aventine Hill in Rome, an intriguing thought popped into the mind of Fr Thomas Esposito: “Wouldn’t it be cool to write a novel that went through a day in the life of a monk?”
Following that thread of inspiration, Fr Esposito jotted a list of chapter headings into his journal. Within the pages of that journal, his idea remained untouched for a decade before he picked it back up again at Our Lady of Dallas Cistercian Abbey in Irving, Texas, to write his debut novel.
The publication this year of Blue Miles: A Monastic Novel marked the culmination of those many years of ruminating, writing and revising.
As Fr Esposito composed his novel – click-clacking away at a computer to produce about 500 words of the narrative at a time – he said he was pleasantly surprised by the peace he experienced when taking the project to prayer.
“There was just a quiet reassurance that I would get in prayer,” Fr Esposito said, “that this project was worth persevering in and seeing through.”
Building upon the chapter structure Fr Esposito mapped out years before in Rome, Blue Miles follows protagonist Padre Samuel O’Malley, an elderly Cistercian monk, as he moves through a day of monastic life at the fictional Presentation Abbey.
Each moment in his day, from matins to compline, is interwoven with the old monk’s reflections and memories from his long, often tumultuous life.
“The narrator reflects on his life, present and past, through different hours of the day,” explained Cistercian Abbot Peter Verhalen, one of a small number of readers to lay eyes on an early draft of the novel, “and that’s an occasion for Fr Thomas to write, I think, really insightful and beautiful reflections on the meaning of our monastic practices.”
Far from a sanitised and saccharine account of a religious vocation, the novel chronicles both the ups and downs of Padre Samuel’s life, from the joys of ministering and teaching to the deep melancholy of loneliness, the agony of addiction, and the complexity of recovery.
“I wanted initially to call it The Life of a Monk,” Fr Esposito said of the novel. “I think Padre Samuel is a thoroughly human priest and monk, and his story is relatable in many different ways, and so I do want people to have an awareness of the hilarity, the ridiculousness, the difficulty, the consolations of the life that monks lead today.”
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Blue Miles, Cistercian monk’s debut novel, offers glimpse into abbey life (By Amy White, Texas Catholic via OSV News)
