Six miles or so outside Chiang Mai, Thailand's second largest city, in the north, the country's first Benedictine monastery has just been opened. Five monks live there, all of them Vietnamese. I read this on the AsiaNews website. The agency Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions points out that this is “a first concrete step in the ‘new evangelisation’, since its importance does not lie primarily in its educational or social role, as it does in its monastic and contemplative life, which are also the bases of Buddhism”.
It is yet another example of synchronicity, in which events unlikely to be causally related are experienced as related: “meaningful coincidences”, Jung called them. I am working on a story about a Burmese “forest monk”. Who in turn is meeting with another Thai monk. It appears that story is continuing at Chiang Mai.
I try to contact the monastery. It's harder than you might think, but in the end I manage it and arrive there just a few days later. It's in an area known as Villa Farang, where the farang, or foreigners, who have married Thais build their houses. It is built on top of an old mango, banana and fig plantation, whose trees still provide shade and fruit. The former plantation also left behind a pond filled with catfish, two glasshouses which are now hen houses and a barn that provided bed and board for the workers and is now used as a kitchen and canteen. "So the smell of the food stays here," explains father Nicolà, the only one of the four monks who speaks a little English.
The actual monastery is a newly constructed white building. There are ten cells for the monks, eight guest rooms, utility rooms, a meeting hall and a chapel. I stay in a bright, comfortable room near the chapel, with a private bathroom with toilet and shower. From the window I can see a row of tall bamboo plants surrounding the monastery like a great green curtain.
The monks are kind and smiling. According to the Rule of Saint Benedict, “Ora et Labora”, they alternate moments of prayer with work, growing crops, doing chores and tending to the hen house.
In short, the monastery is a nice, calm place.

So why aren't I happy here? Why do I leave after just a few days?
It's not the hours they keep. They get up early - at four a.m. for morning prayers - but that's the coolest time of day and I can do some exercise.
It's not the food. Unlike Buddhist monks, who eat a single meal a day at lunchtime, here they eat three square a day. And, apart from the spaghetti I must confess, it's all good. Probably because they look after me, going to the market every day to buy something special.

It's not because of the long periods of prayer set throughout the day according to canonical hours. Or because they pray in Vietnamese. Quite the opposite: the see-sawing tones help me focus on meditation more deeply than happens most of the time.
It's not because of the hours spent alone in between meals and prayers. I stroll around, I take photos of the bamboo, I talk to a gecko, I read and I write.

The fact is that there is nothing to feed my restlessness. Perhaps I am missing the unease I felt in the Shan mountains or on the Laos border with the “forest monks”. Those situations that give me a sense of total alienation. Perhaps mine is an existential unease. This feeling grows stronger when I discover that, according to the Rule of Saint Benedict, the worst kind of monks are the “gyrovagues, wandering aimlessly from one monastery to another, slaves to their own wills and appetites”.
But I don't understand the link between wandering and vice. Saint Benedict scorned these wanderers in the same way the samurai did the ronin, the masterless samurai. One way or another it always comes down to the juxtaposition between principle of authority and individual ethics.
Personally, I've always been fascinated by errant warriors. Like their monastic reincarnation, the Unsui of the Buddhist tradition, who walk from one temple to another seeking a master. The name means “clouds and water”, referring to a Chinese poem that says: “Wandering like clouds and flowing like water". Not to mention that one of the greatest errant monks was a mystical Christian, the Trappist Thomas Merton. He writes in one of his Prayers:
“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that
I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.”
Perhaps, though, the cause of my unease is a recurrence of situations that risk me losing my way, a bit like in this story.
Perhaps, in the end, I am delving too far into the dark depths of the soul. It's time to rise up again.