Vodka at Versailles

I was a Benedictine monk for four years back in the 1970s. Nearly fifty years later, I would still rate my monastic life as critical to my formation as an adult. I enjoyed the book although parts of it were extremely frustrating. Maguire never can get a handle on why her subjects pursued the Carthusian vocation. Nor, save in one case, does she come to grips with why four of them left the Order --- or why one stayed in. The endings seem to come out of nowhere, and when she picks up the threads of their post-monastic lives, Maguire and the men themselves become strangely inarticulate. It seems clear that the vocations mattered to them but not why. It does not say anything negative about religious life to accept that there is a psychology behind it that attracts the devotee. Maguire never gives us any insight into the men as personalities. Which can make a kind of sense, I suppose, since the purpose of the hermit life is to die to self. Nor does the Parkminster community emerge with distinction. The young men (they were all young) were pretty much left to their own devices without much in the way of spiritual direction, or at least it appears that way in Maguire's version. The story is interesting, although I do wish she had managed to explain the attraction of a Carthusian lifestyle to people who have no natural religious sympathies for it. Still, if you do, you will enjoy the book. It provides a partial glimpse of a world not often seen by outsiders.