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Three weeks later, and I’ve made my confessions. But the abbot has still not asked to meet with me, which would be typical for a monk who’s misbehaved as badly as I have.
I find that I don’t dread the meeting the way I would’ve before my trip. Partly it’s because the abbot seems to be just as pleasant and affectionate with me as ever and he talks to me often as I resume my duties in the office. (He’s especially affectionate after I debrief him on my brewing espionage and tell him how robust Mount Sergius’s operation is compared to the abbeys I visited.)
But also I don’t dread it because everything seems inconsequential compared to the grinding and shifting inside my soul. I feel pressed between two millstones, which are pestling me into wet, pulpy paste. Into atoms. Into nothin
