Summer Nights...

There's nothing, and I mean nothing, better than a warm, balmy summer evening. As a child I loved to sit outside until 9, 10pm just enjoying the magic of the sunset and the temperature failing to drop. I still love them. I'm sitting here writing this at my desk, window wide open just enjoying that...that smell. I cannot describe it; it's as if you can smell the humidity.

I think this is why I love the 1980s so much. I've already written at length of my love of Miami Vice and 80s power ballads and soft rock, and both of these things are absolutely, gloriously and shamelessly of their time. There is a reason why cultural epicentres of that great decade were LA, Miami, New York, places that become almost unbearably warm in summer and when the night cools down just enough to remain outside but not roast. I think the first summer in which I was 'awakened' to this twilight beauty was around 2003, when I was 14 and in the Air Training Corps. A kind of scout group attached to the RAF, we undertook field exercises on Friday evenings in Verulamium Park. That was a great summer, one of the warmest on record, and even though I hated the ATC, I loved being out in Verulamium until the 10pm sunset.

Crockett and Tubbs brooding over a summer night...

There's a freedom that comes with summer, and it's a common motif in films and music. Loads of songs have in their title 'summer nights', not least the Grease soundtrack, Richard Marx, Miami Sound Machine...I could go on. I often associate freedom with summer. My best memories of first love were in summer, sitting once more in Verulamium watching the sky get darker, lying next to someone I wanted so much to be with. It was liberation, the ability to be out late and roll in at midnight. Cycling back was a pleasure, and later when working in a bar walking home as the sun rose was equally satisfying. The world sort of reveals itself. The vast majority of people can be themselves again, released into tennis, jogging, evening walks, or just heading out to the pub.

But of course this all sounds like bullcrap to you, true golden Roy prattle. Well, here's a list of songs I associate with summer and summer only. They were written to be played while driving down South Beach with the top down, wearing a pair of Ray Bans and...just...thinking. Not complete, but the ones that make up my canon:

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In the Air Tonight - Phil Collins: Let's start with perfection. One song that still has the ability to make me stop cold in my tracks, and that was before I saw it in its most famous context, during this scene from the pilot episode of Miami Vice. I've linked to the scene for that reason.

Rosanna - Toto: in fact, anything off the 'Toto IV' album is gold for this time of year. I first heard this on a 'Summer Sounds' CD from the Daily Mail. Yup, fifteen year old Roy was that cool...)

Zamba - Bryan Ferry: Once again, the man is a summer savant. From 1985 onwards, having guided Roxy Music to perfection, he writes the kind of songs you just have to feel. I can't name a single lyric from Zamba, but it just feels soooo good! Much softer than the rest, but one definitely for the season.

No Lookin' Back - Michael McDonald: One here from the King of Smooth music, now retrospectively christened the father of 'Yacht Rock'. This one was discovered last year just after I'd finished my finals at York. I was ready to move on and this just became my anthem. If I ever produced an 80s style cop comedy-drama, this would be the song that played as the credits rolled over a shot of me and my partner joking around. Yup, I think too much.

Mighty Wings - Cheap Trick: This is a personal one from that summer of 2003. I'd seen Top Gun about five times by this point, and I remember playing the cassette soundtrack until it warbled. This song is awesome.

E.S.P - Bee Gees: Now I was twelve when I first heard this. It must have changed my life, and ten summers later I still long for the moment I can drive with the window down and absolutely blast this song out. Still proof that you can judge an album's quality by its cover, so long as it has at least one guy with a bi-level and a trench coat on it.

Last Summer - LostProphets: Around 2005/6 I went through a phase in which I hated the side of me that relied on 80s music. Why was I different from the other kids? Actually this is a slight exaggeration. Essentially I turned on Xfm for the first time and heard this, and despite myself quite liked it. I still do, even if LostProphets are for fifteen year old girls who have fringes, chains and 'Team Edward' T-Shirts.

Poison - Alice Cooper: For some reason I associate this with another summer activity of mine- Church Bell Ringing. I still have absolutely no sodding idea why, but I remember walking home from school listening to it on my faithful Walkman. I miss cassette tapes, I really do...

Self Control - Laura Branigan: A song about the night and how it comes alive, by a tragically underrated singer, this was a club hit in the summer of 1984. Laura Branigan sadly died of a brain aneurysm in 2004, but she lives on through this haunting, passionate song.

Endless Summer Nights - Richard Marx: Last song on the list is about the eternal memory of Summer Nights., the ones that remain magical even when both the summer and first love has run its course. I first discovered Richard Marx about a week after breaking up with...let's call her Nena Girl (incidentally I ended the relationship in mid-September: how about that for pathetic fallacy!) and even though this song is now devoid of those post break-up feelings, it's still intensely personal.

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Here's to those endless summer nights. Looking over the list, they seem to have proved great markers of time, of the passage towards something resembling maturity. There are lots of songs I'd also like to include, but these are the ones that always arrive on my iPod as soon as the nights get warm. Enjoy these summer nights while they last...

Sinti and Romani Rights in Germany: A Declaration

On two occasions in the Church of Reconciliation's history, in 1980 and 1993, Sinti and Romani peoples have maintained a hunger strike in the Discussion Room of the Church in opposition to the German government's attempt to deport them back to nations where they have been persecuted for centuries. I have just had the opportunity to look through some of the press cuttings and official statements from that time when I saw a familar name on one of them...

DECLARATION

1. Recognising our duty to protect and promote the dignity of peoples, we place ourselves agains any form of discrimination of people, and thus also against the discrimination of Sinti.

2. We want to do everything in our respective churches, wich which we can deconstruct this aforementioned prejudice and awaken understanding for the particular situation of these, our people living among us.

3. At the same time we request that in this respect both the Bavarian State government and the government of the Federal Rupublic of Germany produce an explanation with respect to the situation soon.

Munich, the 10th September 1980

Johannes Hanselmann, Regional Bishop of the Lutheran Church in Bavaria

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Archbishop of Munich and Freising

Given that ASF were in Dresden two weeks ago campaigning for the rights of those Romani from Kosovo who fled here during the Civil War, it's a shame that the issue is still here, over thirty years later. Incidentally, His Holiness has spoken out quite often to protect the rights of migrants and refugees. It's nice to see it is not merely a Vatican position he's defending but one he's had for many years since...

Thoughts on Violence II: Auschwitz and Kolyma

This time next week I will be in the small Polish town of Oświęcim, better known by its German name of Auschwitz. A quick skim over the Wikipedia article on the town shows it to be both a nice little town, not dissimilar to Dachau, and strangely enough the hometown to a number of professional ice skaters. So, similar to Dachau, this town has settled into a sleepy existence, awoken uneasily by the steady number of international tourists coming to see the place down the road where 1.1 million were gassed, tortured, beaten and worked to death.

I have been before. When I was eighteen and in the Upper Sixth at school I was invited to take part in a Holocaust Education Trust project to send two students from every school to the memorial site in Southern Poland. The day was intense thematically, though the time pressure was the worst; we made the trip in a day, which included return flights from London Luton Airport to Krakow, bus transfer from Krakow to Oświęcim, then the two memorial sites of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II (Birkenau). There was no lunch break, and we met no Poles with the exception of our guide round the site. Our teacher at the time, Ms Piavanini, had chosen us specially for the trip, and in an act beyond the call of pedagogical duty had bought us both copies of the book The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas to read on the journey.

I and my friend, OB, spent much of the day being forcibly cheerful, unsure of what to expect. There had been a preparation seminar in Cambridge a couple of weeks before, at which we discussed the reasons for visiting a memorial site. Of course back then I had no idea that within five years I would be an active part of the Holocaust tourism industry, but the response was rather unified: seeing is believing. Yet looking back, I can remember both of us feeling uneasy at the fact neither of us wanted to weep, or break down, or be removed having fainted. We went round the exhibitions, piled with human hair and belongings, as well as the (horrifically) familiar black and white photos, and yet despite all this neither of us was particularly moved.

Since then I have put this down to our historical distance from the Holocaust and its story of the 'Other', the European, or at the very closest, the immigrant. Had ASF not given me the opportunity to go back, I would not do so. I have seen it once; to go more than that seems extravagant, almost perverse. However, there is somewhere I have a strange longing to go, to see, despite its unfathomable historical and geographical distance: Kolyma.

Our impending seminar in Oświęcim is taking place at a time when my mind is looking eastwards, at the neighbours who have baffled us since the days of the Tsars. I recently came across Martin Amis's Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million a sort of literary exploration of the Purges in the Stalin era Soviet Union. It is Amis's own attempt to understand how his father, Kingsley, came to be a member of the Communist Party in 1940s Britain as well as a journey through the statistics, testimony and facts of the Gulag. Of all this, the place that shocks him most is Kolyma, a small outpost in the far reaches of the Arctic circle where Stalin sent over 3 million people to work and, so he hoped and expected, die. They mined for raw materials and built roads in sub zero temperatures. Nearby are some of the coldest inhabited regions on Earth. The journey there often took weeks, months even, as people were transported thousands of kilometres from their places of birth. Once there, they were kept and forced to work for as long as the government deemed fit. Some were within the Gulag system for upwards of twenty years.

Probably one of the best ways to illustrate Soviet deportation is in Budapest's House of Terror, a museum in the former Secret Police building. I was there in the summer of 2007, with friends after exams and before university, a period of teenage flux when the world feels like it has nothing on you. We went inside completely unaware of what to expect, and one of the first exhibitions was on deportation. The room was covered in a rug with a map of Eurasia. About a fifth of the rug was Europe, then a little further on was Moscow, Leningrad and the Urals. Then there was a huge expanse of 'land'you had to walk over to reach the other side of the room and the information on Siberia and the Gulag. Four years on, that time feels a lifetime away but the memory of that room and the realisation of that unfathomable distance has haunted me ever since

To read all this leaves a kind of natural silence. Not a clamouring of agony, or cries of that weak plea of humanity, "Never Again", now engraved on countless memorials to Holocaust victims, but an emptiness, an acceptance of a reality we cannot control. It is perhaps similar to the images of hundreds of thousands of dead Tutsis in Rwanda, massacred Muslims in Bosnia, or millions of dead workers in Mao's China. The numbers are horrific, but nameless and far too foreign for us to want to comprehend. We let ourselves sit in ignorance. Let me quote you a section from Koba in full:

In 1997, during an interview with Le Monde, [British Historian] Robert Conquest was asked whether he found the Holocaust "worse" than Stalinist crimes: "I answered yes, I did, but when the interviewer asked why, I could only answer honestly with 'I feel so'"

I feel so. The Holocaust remains far more shocking because it is something that a) was a fundamentally populist movement, if a German one, b) was an industrialised and economically driven exercise and c) aimed to exterminate entire ethnic groups entirely in cold blood. Stalins Purges were, in some ways, still rooted in that old fashioned view of violence as impulse. They are not 'particular' like the Holocaust was. They get lumped in with mass murders. Notice Amis, in quoting Conquest, refers to 'Holocaust', a highly emotive word, and 'Stalinist crimes'.

It's most likely a western thing. Thousands of those families came to live in Britain during and after the war. At our preparation seminar for Auschwitz back in 2007, we were introduced to Kitty Hart Moxon, who survived Auschwitz and came to live with relatives in England. She spoke eloquently and in perfect English before a large banner with her looking defiantly into the distance. Her story was one told many times over, worked through into a narrative that no longer hurts. I've noticed the same with other 'regular' Holocaust survivors who talk about their experiences. The Ukranian, Belarusian and Russian survivors who visited Dachau a few weeks ago were, in some cases, telling their stories for the first time. They had spent their entire lives in the Soviet Union, mistrusted as collaborators after spending so long in German captivity, and only in the last few years had they been invited to tell their story. Some of them had little contact other than this visit. Imagine that: the most contact and friendship you get in an entire year being a visit back to a concentration camp.

Auschwitz is a place now synonymous not only with violence, but with evil as well. Other mass murderers don't have that same emotional pull. Noone says 'I feel so' about Rwanda, or Cambodia, or Siberia. That's what I'm going to have to contend with when I set foot through that iconic gatehouse and see the traintrack again, where the selections took place, where people were left hoping that 'Left' or 'Right' meant surviving that day. At the same time though, I still carry with me this question, why it is that we 'feel' the pain of the Holocaust yet can read and discuss other acts of twentieth century mass murder almost unmoved? I am not trying to move attention from the dead of Auschwitz, and we have still lots to learn from this example of Western European genocide.

Perhaps (ironically enough given how separate many ofus feel from this history) our familiarity is the root cause of all of this; the victims of the Holocaust were often westerners from the land that produced of Hegel, Kant, Freud, Luther, Einstein, Beethoven, Wittgenstein among so many others. We thought we knew the Germans. We didn't expect them to massacre an entire section of their population. But the 'Russians'? Communist purges fit into a millenia of massacres, tyrannical governments and oppression that has taken place in Eurasia. Perhaps Stalin merely lived up to a western stereotype, as did those in Rwanda, Cambodia and Bosnia. It's a horrific prospect, but one I suspect has an element of truth to it.

If only everyone could see Auschwitz, Dachau and other places with their own eyes. They would realise it is not the coldness and distance that should shock us, but how familiar these places are, how recognisibly human. To send an opponent away to solve the problem. To use people as tools to build a regime. The maxim of 'No person, no problem.' The next step, is to go to Kolyma, see the remains of human bones lying half buried and know that that too was carried out by the same kind of human.

If my views change in the next week or two (which they might just do) I'll let you know.

Kirchentag with old friends (and two new ones...)

Last week I had the pleasure of representing Action Reconciliation Service for Peace (ASF) at the Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchentag in Dresden. As I appear to have inadvertently written three Carmelite posts in a row, I thought it might be nice to let you know about what is going on right now in my life, an event that's quite a big deal in Germany from the looks of things...

On 1st June I spent five hours on a coach full of young people, all geared up for five days of talks, reflections, dramas, concerts and workshops. This is the Kirchentag, a religious festival with a surprisingly secular reputation, held once every two years. Bringing 120,000 people along with it, the festival takes over any host city and for the duration the east German city of Dresden was overrun with a curious mix of ages. The closest thing I can compare it to in the UK is Greenbelt, which although hosting a similar mix of liberal theology, dread-locked acoustic sessions and everyone-is-welcome-and-it's-awfully-nice-to-come-togetherness comes nowhere near this scale. Or this level of respectability. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel was speaking at an official event (her father was a Protestant minister in the GDR at a time when it was the only way to speak out against the regime), as was Leader of the Opposition Sigmar Gabriel. For all Greenebelt's good intentions, the platform they offer is for a minority audience; this had regular updates on N24, Germany's version of BBC Parliament.

So what was my place in this miasma of good feeling and middle age? Over the course of three days ASF had a stall in the Markt der Moeglichkeiten, or "Market of Possibilities", in which we had the chance to speak to young people wandering around, thinking about what to do after school. In Germany the 'Gap-Yah' concept is not so much frowned upon as a luxury as actively encouraged, particularly given the need to learn English and at least one other foreign language. Up until January all eighteen year old boys had to undertake either six months military or eight months voluntary service. ASF is just one of hundreds of organisations that support volunteers.

We also had a serious political purpose for being there. As yet another measure of the Kirchentag's political importance, the Secretary of the Kirchentag was invited to report to the Bundestag with a number of resolutions supported by at least 3,000 Kirchentag participants. ASF's was a petition against the imminent deportation of 10,000 Romany people from Kosovo who immigrated to Germany during the war in Kosovo in the late 1990s. This is not a particular popular issue in Germany, where most people associate the Sinti and Romany communities with thieves, beggars and criminals. We're not above this of course, as anyone in the UK who saw My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding can attest to. Needless to say, we reached our goal of 3,000 on the first day, such was the strength of our team, and our Resolution gained the most support.

And we sold buttons, or badges as we Brits call 'em. Lots of them. German teenagers can't get enough of the iconic East German 'Ampelmann' (traffic light man) and his 'Go Think' catchphrase!

Much of my free time was spent as ever with friends, as a number of ASF volunteers from Berlin had popped down from Dresden to help out. We wandered the reconstructed streets, relaxed along the banks of the River Elbe and generally enjoyed the early June sunshine as well as the gorgeous sunsets they produced. As an Englishman in Dresden, I searched long and hard for the memorial to the almost 30,000 who died during the Allied Bombing Raid and the resulting fire storms in February 1945. There was an altar dedicated to the victims of National Socialism in the Catholic Cathedral of the Trinity, though little else. I assume this has something to do with Dresden's place as the focal point for far-right anger. In February there were violent clashes between Fascist and anti-Fascist demonstrators, as there have been ever since the wall fell. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut, "So it goes".

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On the last night we were told there would be attending something called a Russendisko at the German Hygiene Museum. All the ASF volunteers were invited, so we duly arrived an hour early at a (ironically enough for a Hygiene Museum) clinical-white bulding to find that hundreds of people were also vying to get in. We were the lucky ones, and we settled down to two and a half hours of Eastern european club anthems, all mixed by the self appointed master of Russendisko, Vladimir Kaminer. A Russian of Jewish ancestry who came to Berlin in 1990, he developed the Russendisko during Berlin's fledgling years of post-Communist growth. His club nights became immensely popular and are today a mainstay of the German club scene. Today he is as famous for his collections of short stories as he is for his club nights. He writes primarily about his own experiences as a Russian in Germany, as well as about modern Russian culture, all in his own sarcastic and self deprecating style. He writes in German (something I consider very impressive!) and narrates his audio books himself, with trademark Russian accent. I'll let you know how I get on with his books.

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One final thing before I end this rather rambling account of Kirchentag. I met two young bears during my time in Dresden. They are Rudik (Rudolf) and Moosh (Mashambanzou), and they were helping out at a stand on HIV/AIDS relief (they are HIV positive). I asked them where their rather interesting names came from; Rudik is named after Rudolf Nureyev, who danced through his illness before dying of AIDS in 1993, while Moosh is short for Mashambanzou, which means 'The darkness before the dawn', or simply 'hope' in Zimbabwean and is the name for a hugely successful HIV/AIDS education project near Harare. We got chatting and they mentioned that they hadn't seen Bavaria yet, so I invited them to come stay with me for a while. Here they are, having cleared everything with their project and smuggled on to the bus back to Dresden with me.

They will stay with me and remind me of a great few days, and in particular of the surprising ways in which faith and politics can sometimes interact with mutual respect.

Carmelites in Dachau

Yesterday I finally sat down and made a list of all the Carmelite friars who were interred in Dachau Concentration Camp. It required spending an hour going through Egon Weiler's authoritative The Religious in Dachau, which contains information on all three thousand priests, brothers and religious. There really were priests and religious from all denominations, though 94% were Latin rite Catholics.

In total there were 11 Carmelites in Dachau, eight from Poland and three from the Netherlands. Six of them would survive their time in Dachau, some for almost four and a half years; the other five did not. Two of them were beatified, Bl. Titus Brandsma and Bl. Hilary Januszewski.

Where both names were given, I have included their profession name in brackets. They are:

Brandsma, Anno (Titus) Died 1942 in Dachau

Buszta, Antoni: Died 1942 in Dachau

Januszewski, Pawel (Hilary): Died 1945 in Dachau

Koza, Michel (Leon): Died 1942 in Dachau

Majcher, Pawel: Liberated 1945

Makowski, Pawel: Died 1942 in Dachau

Nowakowski, Franciszek: Liberated 1945

Rypma, John (Desiderius): Liberated 1945

Tijhuis, Bernard (Raphael): Liberated 1945

Urbanski, Zenon (Albert): Liberated 1945

Wszelaki, Adam: Liberated 1945

From the information given, as well as then Prior General Fr. Joseph Chalmer's letter on the Beatification of Hilary Januszewski, it seems that four of the Polish Carmelites were arrested on the 18th September in Krakow, before being sent to Sachsenhausen or Auschwitz Concentration Camps for approximately month. They were then transferred to the Priesterblock 28 in Dachau in mid December 1940.

I felt it important to compile this list, as I haven't seen it anywhere before, not even in books about Bl. Titus. Six of these men, four Polish and two Dutch, went back to their Carmelite way of life having gone through the most horrific treatment. With the exception of Br. Raphael and Fr. Albert Urbanski (who held a Curia position later in his life if I remember rightly) their lives seem to have been forgotten. Both Raphael and Albert wrote of their experiences as well. The identities of the other seven were a mystery to me. I was aware of their existence, as I knew that Bl. Hilary's story involved the deportation of at least four brothers from Krakow, but if there is anything this year has taught me it is the value and meaning of a name to one's identity as a person.

Next week I will be visiting Auschwitz and Krakow for a seminar, one of the final events in my time here in Dachau; I will try and remember their names as I go around.

R.I.P Fr. David Waite, O.Carm

I had hoped to first blog about the amazing few days I just spent in Dresden during the Deutscher Envangelischer Kirchentag, but that will have to wait. This morning, the 6th June 2011, Fr. David Waite died in his sleep at Aylesford Priory, Kent.

The interview process to join the Carmelites has meant I have visited Aylesford three times this year, each for a couple of days at a time. On these occasions I had the pleasure of getting to know David, even if through just a few conversations in the community room. Everyone who spoke to me about David at this time always said how much he was at peace with the cancer which eventually killed him, and how much they admired him for it. The last time we spoke, a couple of weeks ago just after I had been accepted into the novitiate, I asked him cheerfully how he was. He replied, equally cheerfully, "I'm just taking each day as it comes."

At the age of twenty two those are not easy words to hear or to accept. I doubt they were any easier for him to say at the age of sixty four. I can only pray I may have that kind of acceptance and comfort in God's love if I am ever in the same situation. If you do, pray also for the Carmelites and the community at Aylesford, who have now lost two of their brothers in less than a month. A family is grieving.

For a short obituary go to the news page of the British Province of Carmelites

Carmel: Why it has happened to me

I've been in the UK the last few days, visiting my family in St Albans and Portsmouth. It's strange returning home after being in Munich for so long; everything is normal, understandable and familiar, from places I've been to the newspapers I read. I enjoy the strangeness of living in Germany and being immersed in a different culture, but at the same time it's nice to be home.

There's a very potent word/concept right there. Home. For many people it is the place you grew up, or where your family live. For others, it is something more complex. I remember hearing somebody ask a Methodist friend of mine rather casually "Where's home for you?", obviously not expecting the long, soul searching answer they received in reply. Over the past few years, the idea of home and where I feel at home has been going through my mind. More often than not, I refer to places where I am living as home, such as York, Konstanz and finally Munich. Sometimes, I may even refer to St Albans or London as home. Yet these thoughts are occurring at a deeper level than thinking superficially of a location.

I consider home to be where I am most comfortable, where I am able to grow and where I feel loved. This of course transcends concepts of place and finds its meaning in relationships and personal worth, in communities, in family. At twenty two years old, I believe it's normal to be considering "What's home for me?" I believe I may have found it. In September 2011, I will enter the Carmelite Order as a novice friar.

For some people who read this blog (some of you Carmelites) this will have been pretty clear from previous posts about Carmelites in KZ Dachau, about my growing faith and other such things that people who think about religious life dwell on too much. For others this may be a bolt out of the blue. Either way, this is a way of life that has tempted me from my first months at university. At York I developed a close relationship with the Carmelite friars and laity in the city, and they accepted me, bad music taste, cynicism and all. I met friars visiting York, I began to attend Carmelite Spirituality Group meetings and found myself with a group of imperfect but honest and good people. In April 2009 I began to visit friar communities in the UK, wondering if I could really live with these people. Essentially, it has now taken me almost four years to say, "Yes, let's try."

Many things have gone through my mind, including many fears and worries. Am I simply trying to escape the 'real' world of student debt and dead-end jobs, running away from responsibilities? Do I really want to give up the chance of having children? Why not 'live' a few years, and allow God to pull me back in with G.K. Chesterton's proverbial 'twitch upon the thread' once I've had a few years of libertine living? These are worthwhile questions, and ones to which I cannot answer certainly 'No.' However, there are two more questions which the Carmelites consider more important. They are "Can you grow with us?" and "Are you comfortable with us?". To these I can answer with a sheepish, "Yes, possibly."

The novitiate isn't intended to be an everlasting commitment. It is an opportunity to taste and see, to try the lifestyle. Of course I would like to believe that I will remain for longer, but I will not know that until I have tried religious life, experienced its rhythm of prayer become routine, been forced to live with the dynamics of community.

In 1930, a week after his conversion to Catholicism, Evelyn Waugh wrote an article for the Daily Express entitled "Converted to Rome: Why it has happened to me." (the title of this blog should now make more sense as a literary reference no-one understands. Go me.) Conversion begins with a contradiction of that statement, the willingness to stand up and accept an invitation to grow. The rest of the experience is however often passive. Carmelite spirituality sometimes feels like that. I did not wake up one day and say "Today I will be a Carmelite", it just happened that I realised I felt at home with a bunch of imperfect, middle aged men and that they might be able to teach me something about who I really am.

That may change, maybe not. All I know is that right now I feel at home with them. I feel no need to perform, no pressure to impress them, no desperation to fill an awkward silence. I can be me. Even better, I might be able to learn who 'me' is. That journey, the one we all take, continues in a new way in September.