The Abbey Up the Hill: A Year in the Life of a Monastic Day Tripper
Bonomo's month-by-month journal of a year among Benedictine monks invites comparison with Kathleen Norris's 1996 award-winning bestseller, The Cloister Walk, though the two books differ markedly in tone and content. Both authors are middle-aged, married oblates (vowed laypersons) in the Order of St. Benedict. But while Norris's wide-ranging essays may idealize monasticism, Bonomo's reflections spare no one, taking aim at boring homilies, inadequate hospitality, polyurethane upholstery and, above all, her own self-described crankiness. Yet Bonomo, an overscheduled speechwriter, clearly loves St. Augustine's Abbey, where for several days each month she makes a personal retreat. Her lifelong rootlessness no longer appeals to her: "I seem to have been born slamming doors shut behind me and then wondering where everybody went." Tired of false starts and sudden endings, she doggedly pursues stability, a hallmark of the Benedictine vow. Throughout, Bonomo deftly interweaves her personal story her alcoholism, her father's sudden death, her persistent fear of being an outsider with cryptic tales from the fourth-century desert fathers and mothers, principles from the 20th-century Twelve Step movement and wisdom from all 73 chapters of the sixth-century Rule of St. Benedict. As in a good novel, her character develops believably. Without forsaking her acerbic wit, Bonomo eventually finds a father figure in the kindly nonagenarian abbot, a home in the abbey and its Rule, and the beginnings of stability: "This year, for once, I stayed still." A down-to-earth spiritual journey memoir, this book is also a painless introduction to the Rule of St. Benedict.Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.