There’s a word on our founding paperwork that I don’t use.
When you file for religious status in this country, the state would like to know who’s in charge, and it would like the answer in a vocabulary it already recognizes. Pastor. Rector. Abbot. The form didn’t ask for evidence of a holy man. It asked for the name of one, then simply took my word for it. So the documents say Abbot, the clerks in vestments are satisfied, and the file goes in a drawer.
That’s where the title came from. A blank on a form. It didn’t come from a congregation and it didn’t come from anybody who’d watched me on a bad day.
So I don’t use it. I’m the founder. It’s a title you get for filling out forms correctly, which is not nothing. There was a leap in it. I put money I’m not getting back into a room nobody was sitting in yet, and that was the first thing I ever did that felt like faith instead of opinion. It’s just not the same word as the other one.
What the office actually is
I want to lay out the job without sounding like I’m measuring myself for the robe. Tailors don’t ask what you did to deserve the suit either. They just take the measurement and try not to look at the boots.
Somebody is going to call me on the worst night of their life.
Not with a question about Marcus Aurelius. Not to talk through the dichotomy of control. They’ll call because somebody died, or because they did a thing they can’t take back, and whoever answers that phone has to be steady when he isn’t, present when he’s had enough of people, and honest when a comfortable lie would go down easier for everybody in the room.
That’s the office. It isn’t a robe and it isn’t a seat at the front of the room. It’s the man who picks up at three in the morning and doesn’t flinch.
The tradition holds him accountable for every soul in the house. Not responsible for their choices. Accountable for whether the house was worth walking into.
Seriously, read it twice and then tell me a man ought to hand that title to himself because a form had a blank on it.
I’m not going to deny it either
Now, I’d be lying to you if I said I wasn’t aiming at it.
I’m not refusing the word as a performance of humility. That’s its own species of vanity and I’ve already got plenty of the ordinary kind. I’m refusing it because it isn’t mine yet. There’s a difference between a man who says “oh, I couldn’t possibly” and a man who says “not yet, and I know exactly what’s missing.”
I’m doing the job. Every day, as well as I’m able, and poorly often enough that I keep a list of fifty principles around to stay out of the ditches.
If somebody someday says “Beau’s the Abbot,” I won’t argue with them. That’s the whole point. That’s the message a man is supposed to pick up on his own if I’m doing this right, and it was never mine to declare.
No charter, no committee
I could spend six months defining the office. Charter language, succession, criteria, and a committee to argue about the criteria.
I’m not going to do that. You don’t become the thing by documenting the thing. Every hour I spend describing an Abbot on paper is an hour I’m not out being one, and at the end of it I’d have a beautiful document and the same empty chair.
So I’m living it until it comes true, or until it doesn’t.
The chair
There’s an Abbot’s chair in this Order. I’m not in it yet.
Here’s how I’ll know whether I ever got there. It’s a simple test.
Somebody looks around this Order in ten years and says, “Yeah, I know Beau founded it. But, uhm… who’s the Abbot?”
That’s the verdict. That’s the whole of my failure, said out loud by a stranger who meant nothing by it.
Beau