At the end of October 2011 I boarded the regional train from Munich toward Salzburg. An hour through the Upper Bavarian hills, get off at Prien, twenty minutes with a rolling suitcase to the landing stage. I was one of three passengers aboard the MS Berta. The mountain panorama was mirrored in the smooth surface of Lake Chiemsee, gulls escorted the boat, and to the east the tower of Frauenwörth Abbey came into view.
Half a year earlier I had ended a fifteen-year career in the financial industry. Not because I had a plan, but because I no longer saw the point. I did not want to be a slave to a high salary and a secure pension. What was to come next, I did not know. I needed quiet to find out, and the idea had come to me because I had read that the filmmaker Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck goes to a monastery when he doesn't know how to go on.
A male Protestant in a Catholic convent — is that even possible? At registration no one asked about my denomination. Fifty euros for full board. Anyone who helps out in the mornings stays free.
When I used to find a crucifix on the wall in a guesthouse, I would carefully take it down. I felt watched and uneasy in the presence of a dead man. Here one hung in my room, and I let it hang. Here he is the master of the house, I thought. Here he belongs.
On the second morning I went to Lauds. Thirty women in black habits in the choir stalls, Gregorian chant, a Latin text of which I understood not a word. In the weeks before I had quarreled a great deal with my wife. Since the resignation the situation had been tense, and I had accused Celia of not wanting to change anything. While the sisters were singing, I suddenly saw her eyes in front of me. I recognized the light in them and understood what a gift she is in my life. It knocked me over. To this day I am not sure what happened in that chapel, and I have stopped trying to explain it.
The sentence that has stayed with me longest came from one of the sisters. I had asked her how she stands it: no possessions, every day in the same rhythm, needing the abbess's approval for a trip to the mainland. She said she was one link in an endlessly long chain. For over a thousand years prayers have been said here four times a day. Now she sits on a chair for a few decades, like many before her and many after.
I have used that sentence often since without ever quoting it. It describes the exact countermovement to what I knew from the bank: the notion that everything hangs on my person. The pressure to be irreplaceable looks like responsibility. Mostly it is the opposite — a lack of context. Whoever stands in a chain can take their own section seriously without having to carry the whole chain.
The word for this is humility, and I hesitate to use it. In business it sounds like making yourself small, like giving up ambition, like a virtue for people without drive. Something else is meant. Humility is an assessment of your own size that happens to be accurate. Whoever has it need make themselves neither larger nor smaller than they are — and both save a surprising amount of energy.
The objection is legitimate: there is a false humility that is nothing but retreat. Whoever says they are only one link in a chain can also use it to justify deciding nothing. The sister did the opposite. She sat on her chair four times a day. Her sense of proportion did not relieve her of the task. It only relieved her of the burden of being the whole task.
One detail I have kept, because it fits nothing else and therefore belongs. The year before, a sister told me with shining eyes, the nativity scene had been unveiled on Christmas morning. In the straw lay not the Christ child. There the fat abbey tomcat had made himself comfortable, between Joseph and Mary.
On the day before Christmas Eve I traveled back. I had no plan, no calling and no answer. I had only stopped expecting one.
It made me more content — and not because I have wanted less since. Because less depends on my being the one who does it.