The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; 

but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.

(Matt. 8:20)

PART I

It was written

In the blueprint of my life it is written that I shall enter a Carthusian convent. Looking back on it now, I sometimes think: “Me?”

In 1987 I entered a new Carthusian convent within the Catholic Church. This convent is based on the eremitic life as conceived by Saint Bruno of Cologne, who, in 1048, gathered six companions and withdrew to the mountains around Grenoble, the site of the renowned monastery La Grande Chartreuse.

The rituals and ceremonial rites observed by the order I entered derive from the Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches, whereas Saint Bruno observed the Latin (Roman Catholic) rites. Silence is the foundation of both. Life in a Carthusian convent is dominated by silence. My choice to follow this way of life was entirely intuitive; it was my salvation after a wild life marked by extremes.

As a student in Leiden I was pretty wild. I was a regular at the student union, joined a popular student society and lived in a women’s dormitory with a reputation for partying. I liked to drink, smoke and have a good time. In short, I lived life to the full. But I must have sensed intuitively that only strict discipline could help me out of this internal and external chaos. Even though this period may have looked like a lot of fun from the outside, a gradual but extremely strong process had been set in motion within me.

Student life was easy: my grant was paid in monthly instalments and my parents were understanding and gave me plenty of freedom and space. Yet I sensed it couldn’t last. I felt as if I was on a high and bound to crash at some point. I had a deep sense of dissatisfaction and aimlessness. The life I was leading lacked depth, while the life that awaited me was bound to be extremely predictable. I would probably marry a boy I met at university, have three or four children and spend my days playing hockey and golf and taking the Labrador for a walk. The prospect was off-putting, to say the least.

So it’s fair to say that my search originated in a negative state of mind, but perhaps that’s common. Dissatisfaction is often the driving force behind the search for something new.

It felt as if the outside world was keeping me away from my innermost self. I wanted to leave that world behind in a bid to find myself again. This was something I sensed intuitively and it spurred me on.

Everybody expected me to go to university. History was an obvious choice. I was trying to find myself and thought I would discover my origins in history. The notion of “becoming in being” and the struggle between spirit and matter gave me a deep sense of continuity. Yet it failed to still my greatest hunger. I yearned for another, deeper form of knowledge. Philosophy would have been a better choice, although I know now that it wouldn’t have given me the answers to my most burning questions. After all, this wasn’t about intellectual knowledge, but about inner experience.

The first time my inner self was deeply touched was at the end of my first year at university. Prior to that I had dabbled in spirituality, but it had been too vague and it failed to touch me.

After a lazy first year I decided, on somebody’s advice, to spend some time studying at a convent and take resits so that I could pass the year. It was a remarkable and profound experience, which I shall never forget. I ended up in a totally different world.

The convent was in the south of the Netherlands. I was astounded that people could live and ostensibly be happy this way. What struck me most was the silence. In those days, I never had a minute’s silence. In our student digs music was on full blast day and night and my car always reverberated with noise. Silence was unfamiliar to me and left a great impression. In this silence I experienced something, something very deep: contact with myself. With my divine core perhaps? Sometimes I would get up at night to enjoy the silence and then when I looked up at the starry sky I had a very deep sense of oneness and connectedness with everything.

One night I attended the “night office”, a liturgical service held in the middle of the night, a kind of vigil. It was an extraordinary experience. The energy generated by the prayers was palpable, despite the fact that I didn’t participate in the liturgy myself – after all, I was only there to study. I had never experienced anything like it: a deep sense of peace that had been quite unfamiliar to me during that period of restlessness and dissatisfaction.

The strict daily routine also calmed me down and, oddly enough, created inner space. It gave me a brief taster of the impact of order on a life full of chaos. For a split second I experienced something I would learn later: doing as you please doesn’t set you free. My stay lasted exactly one week, but it transformed the course of my life. From that moment on I decided to search, untiringly, for what had touched me. I wanted to interpret, label and, above all, understand it, get my head round it.

That search meant there was a long time between my first experience and my ultimate decision to enter a Carthusian convent. Six years, to be precise. My suspicious, rational mind wanted to get to the bottom of this mysterious and indefinable phenomenon. At that moment the most important thing for me was to understand what had touched me, what lay behind that profound experience.

My lengthy search took me to convents and abbeys. The perennial dilemma was my attraction to convent life on the one hand and my revulsion on the other. Something in me found it repulsive, backward and escapist, while another part of me thought it was immensely fascinating and enchanting. For six years I was torn between these conflicting emotions. It felt like some kind of forbidden love, which I discussed with very few people. My friends later reproached me for never confiding in them. Yet I couldn’t possibly talk about it, because I myself was unable to see what was happening inside me. In a bid to broaden my horizons I started searching in the alternative spiritual sector, but at the time it struck me as insufficiently authentic. It came across as a ragbag of experiences, which was a let-down.

For want of an explanation I turned towards the religious tradition in which I had grown up. This Catholic tradition offered structure, giving me at least something of a crutch. As a child I had started praying for myself, that is to say, I had started asking all kinds of questions. But during adolescence I had gradually given up praying following the first few disappointments and frustrations life had thrown at me. To my mind praying was a sham, as nobody was listening to me. So I stopped praying.

Such was my relationship with faith when, after finishing my BA, I set off for India to spend a couple of months working in Mother Theresa’s first Home. I wanted to find God and it seemed more likely that He would be among the poor than in the isolation of a contemplative convent. Mother Theresa’s first Home in Calcutta was a former mosque given to her by the city council. It was full of dying people who had been picked up off the street, lepers and people with worms literally crawling out of their skin. I washed them, fed them and even gave them the occasional injection. It affected me deeply and it was an important experience.

Mother Theresa was immensely driven. I was impressed by her small figure in that bare chapel in the centre of Calcutta, devoid of any splendour, with sacks on the floor and a crucifix on the wall. Her willpower was gigantic and her faith could move mountains. She was good to me as well; she must have sensed the authenticity of my quest. I spent just under two months working there in appalling conditions. But I felt very strongly that this wasn’t it; too little depth, too devotional, but above all: not enough silence. People spoke about God whereas I wanted to experience God. That much I knew.

After three months I returned to the Netherlands to study for my MA. For want of a clear direction this seemed the best option. However, I was unable to resume my former student lifestyle, which I had come to detest after my experiences in India. I continued my studies in Leiden from my parents’ home.

At that time I met my first spiritual teacher, Bavo, a Trappist monk. He practised Zen and had studied under H. M. Enomiya-La Salle, the man who had introduced Zen to Europe. I met Bavo during a family visit to the Abbey of Zundert, in the south of the country. As a boy he had lived next door to my mother in Heemstede and she was the one who introduced me to him. I felt drawn to him and afterwards visited him once a year in the Abbey of Zundert. He was a great inspiration to me, but Zen’s emptiness was still a bridge too far. I thought it was beautiful, but it was of no use to me. I lost myself amid the emptiness.

Although studying had seemed the right decision, I had lost all appetite for it. I still cherished a great desire for silence. My search continued. I ended up with the Benedictine Sisters in Oosterhout in the southern Dutch province of Noord-Brabant and their life appealed to me. The liturgy and above all the psalms carried real resonance. I decided to take the plunge and try this life. I officially entered into the order, which those around me found difficult to come to terms with. My father and female friends from Leiden, especially, thought it all sounded rather dull. All in all I stayed just over a year, but again I found it wasn’t for me. To my mind the liturgy received too much attention at the expense of solitude and silence. I experienced the frequent singing lessons and daily recreation periods with people I hadn’t chosen to be with as obstacles on the path to my inner self. The average age of the elderly sisters also weighed on me and I decided not to stay.

That said, while staying with the Benedictine Sisters I did read some beautiful books, including one by Dom André Louf, abbot at Abbey De Katzberg in France. His book pointed me towards the Jesus Prayer. It restored something of that first experience: inner peace with a deep sense of oneness and connectedness. At the same time it aroused my interest in the Rule of Saint Benedict and I decided to complete my history degree after all. I returned to Leiden for my MA, specializing in Medieval History. As the topic of my final dissertation I chose Hildegard of Bingen’s interpretation of the Rule of Saint Benedict.

Meanwhile I continued my restless search for a place where I might feel at home. It was a sad period. My experience with the Benedictine Sisters had been a disappointment and I no longer felt at home in Leiden or at my parents’, where I was staying for the time being. However, whilst with the Benedictine Sisters I had become curious about the desert fathers and the Byzantine monasticism of Mount Athos (a republic of monks on a Greek peninsula). I had a clear sense that my way would be that of the hermit. Fascinated, I decided to go in search of such a life.

A single female Carthusian convent remained, in France, and I contacted them. The Carthusian order most closely observes the tradition of the original desert fathers and that was what I wanted: complete solitude and absolute silence. I had discovered as much during my long quest. It hoped that it would lead me to that inner experience I was so desperately trying to find. But the advanced age of the nuns at this Carthusian convent in France deterred me. I was afraid that within less than ten years I would have become a geriatric nurse and the prospect put me off. So my search continued, until somebody tipped me off about a new Carthusian convent in the Belgian Ardennes. I was 27 by then and about to graduate. One winter’s day in February 1987, with the Ardennes covered by a blanket of snow, I knocked on the door of this new Carthusian convent, in Marche-les-Dames, part of the city of Namur.

PART II

Admission

It was a picturesque little convent with pretty nuns. The prioress or starets[1] was young, charming and radiant. A great passion had brought her here, not a desire to escape. She was not alone in this and that made the community special.