A Friar's Tale. John Collins

      Preface

      A Friar’s Tale started out as one thing but ended up becoming something quite other. It began in 2012 as a brief and rather jaunty little memoir. It also was supposed to be Fr. Benedict’s last major publication. He knew he was rapidly approaching a moment when writing would no longer be possible for him, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to throw away his pen. He wanted one more crack at doing a book, and he wanted it to be something that would be easy and that he would enjoy writing. Despite all that, his plan to do a memoir astonished those who knew him. It seemed out of character and even daring. Father, you see, was a very private man and (in the Irish way) saw no good reason to share the particulars of his life with anyone beyond a small group of intimates. He was not used to putting himself at the center of his writings. In fact, that was something he had avoided for years. But he made a commitment to do so, and then rather fearlessly he entered the uncharted territory of self-disclosure.

      He made several tapes that became the basis of the first chapter before illness and circumstances forced him to stop work for a lengthy period. When he was able to begin again he was living a new life as a resident of a nursing home in New Jersey. He had little to do and was eager to pick up where he had left off, but he actually didn’t pick up where he had left off. He picked up nearly twenty years later. And that was to become the pattern from then on. He would speak about whatever came into his mind at the moment: his time as a novice, his years at Children’s Village, his coming to Trinity Retreat. There was no rhyme or reason as far as I could see, but the book slowly began to take shape as if it were a jigsaw puzzle that needed to be painstakingly pieced together.

      By the time a little more than one hundred pages were done Father’s strength had deteriorated to such an extent that he couldn’t continue. He tried but could produce only disjointed bits and pieces that were often repetitive or even contradictory. The project was shelved as we prayed for better days. Those days were not to come, and so at Father’s death the manuscript consisted only of those same pages, not a word had been added in at least a year.

      So it seemed that A Friar’s Tale would never see the light of day. It would remain but a tantalizing fragment. However, it was a fragment that seemed to exert a surprising pull on some of those who knew of its existence. Many of those people hoped that some way could be found to bring the manuscript to completion in a way