Bedtime.

Climbing into the bed in my hotel "cell", in the Franziskaner Kloster on Frauenberg, and I feel cosy surrounded by a luxurious duvet, deep pillow and starched white sheets, but somehow Saint Francis of Assisi is absent. A mendicant friar order should surely be closer to the poverty of the ideal and shouldn't have a hotel next to their monastery and keep themselves to themselves while I battle with those reformation ghosts again

Once, many years ago, as I cried on the threshold of another Kloster, desperate for a place to sleep, those brothers took me in for the night. This was at a Capuchin order in 's-Hertogenbosch. Perhaps I was more "bare" for all to see because I really didn't know why I was traipsing across the Netherlands and was falling lower and lower mentally. In my memories of that occasion I recall feeling pushed, briefly, towards that way and seriously contemplated signing up. While I sat there at the same table with the monks, for both repase and ontbijt, we engaged in warm conversations and I felt welcomed into a zone I really had issues comprehending.