I am aware of the irony. A Benedictine priest, long withdrawn, now appearing in the great clamor of the digital world. There was a time when such a step would have struck me as a mistake. Perhaps it still is. Yet I have come to see it less as an initiative and more as a response, or even an obligation. I do not write these words with confidence. I write them in obedience to something quieter but firmer than my reluctance.
In 2017 I withdrew from public life. This was not the result of scandal or fatigue. It was a deliberate act, prayerfully discerned, and rooted in the sense that my presence was no longer useful. I had nothing new to say. The Church was already filled with voices. I sought to step away, not to flee, but to preserve what silence remained in me. That silence became my teacher.
For several years I did not speak, at least not beyond the walls of the hermitage. I read. I prayed. I grieved. The grief was not sentimental. It was the slow and persistent ache of watching the sacred become theatrical. Beauty, once the servant of truth, had been repurposed for novelty. Reverence had become a posture, no longer a posture of the soul, but a brand. I did not blame. I simply could not remain part of it.
But grief, if it is true, must eventually become a form of witness. Silence alone is no longer sufficient when desecration becomes routine. I have no interest in argument or in joining debates that change nothing. I do not seek an audience. I do not believe I am needed. I speak now only because something in me has become burdened by what is forgotten. I do not speak to draw attention, but to say that memory is still possible. That what was once holy has not ceased to be so, even if it is mocked or ignored.
Social media is not my world. It is noisy and often cruel. But it is also where souls now wander. The modern soul, increasingly unmoored from tradition, is still searching. Sometimes it searches in strange places. I have seen, even in fragments, the ache for something true. If I can offer a word, a prayer, a line that recalls the sacred, then that is reason enough to be here.
I will not be interactive. I will not answer questions or respond to comments. My work is to speak from the margin. I will write when I feel led to do so. I do not promise regularity. This is not a platform. It is a threshold. If you find something here that speaks to you, receive it as you would receive a moment of quiet in a chapel you did not expect to enter.
I remain what I have always been: a monk. And monks speak rarely. But when they do, they speak out of silence. That is what I hope to do here.