bedelaar 6

With hopes such as these... 

he came to La Trappe, and again was disappointed. The good monks declined even to reconsider his case. But he went on to Sept Fonts, as he had said he would in his letter, and there was accepted. For the third time he settled down to test his vocation as a monk. The trial lasted only eight months. He seems to have been happier here than anywhere before, yet in another sense he was far from happy. 

This youth with a passion for giving up everything, found that even in a Trappist monastery, he could not give up enough. He craved to be yet more poor than a Trappist, he craved to be yet more starving. And what with his longing to give away more, and his efforts to be the poorest of the poor, he began to shrink to a mere skeleton, as he had done before at Montreuil. Added to this he fell ill, and was disabled for two months. 

Once more the community grew anxious. It was only too clear that he would never do for them. As soon as he was well enough to take the road, he was told that he must go, that the strict life of the Trappist was too much for him, and with a 'God's will be done' on his lips, and some letters of recommendation in his pocket, Benedict again passed out of the monastery door, into a world that hurt him.

Nevertheless in those few months... 

he had begun at last to discover his true vocation. 

Though the longing for the monastic life did not entirely leave him, still he was beginning to see that there was now little hope of his being able to embrace it in the ordinary way. He was unlike other men. He must take the consequences and he would. He could not be a monk like others, then he would be one after his own manner. 

He could not live in the confinement of a monastery, then the whole world should be his cloister. There he would live, a lonely life with God, the loneliest of lonely men, the outcast of outcasts, the most pitied of all pitiful creatures, 'a worm and no man, the reproach of men, and the outcast of the people.' He would be a tramp [landloper], God's own poor man, depending on whatever men gave him from day to day, a pilgrim to heaven for the remainder of his life. 

He was twenty-five years of age.

He set off on his journey...

with Rome as his first objective. 

A long cloak covering him, tied with a rope round the waist, a cross on his breast, a large pair of beads round his neck. His feet were partly covered with substitutes for shoes, carefully prepared, one might have thought, to let in water and stones. 

In this dress, he braved every kind of weather, rain and snow, heat and the bitterest cold. He faced and endured it all without ever wincing [huiveren] or asking for a change. Over his shoulder he carried an old sack, in which were all his belongings. Chief among these were a bible and prayerbook. 

He ate whatever men gave him. If they gave him nothing, he looked to see what he could find on the roadside. He refused to take thought for the morrow, if at any time he had more than sufficed for the day, he invariably gave it to another.

Moreover, as a result of his poverty... 

Benedict soon ceased to be clean. 

The smell of Benedict was not always pleasant. Even his confessor - who wrote his life - tells us very frankly, that when Benedict came to confession, he had to protect himself from vermin [ongedierte]. Men of taste, even those who later came to look on him as a saint, could scarcely refrain from drawing aside when he came near them. 

And when they did... then was Benedict's heart full of joy. He had found what he wanted, his garden enclosed, his cloister that shut him off in the middle of the world. And the more he was spurned and ignored, the more did he lift up his eyes to God in thanksgiving.

[ewtn]