Spiritual Wealth

As a monk, he took a vow of poverty. But he learned that didn’t mean money wasn’t important.

- DOUG LYNAM, Santa Fe, New Mexico

From monk to money manager. Not only is that the title of a book I’ve written, but it’s pretty much my résumé. For 20 years, I was a monk, and now I’m a partner at a wealth management company. Sound like two completely different callings? The irony of my life is that I joined a monastery in part to escape the world of finance. I ended up spending more time worrying about money than anyone.

Right after graduating from college with a math and philosophy degree, I decided to enter a Benedictine monastery. I was searching for meaning in my life. I thought that if I was ever going to find it, a monastery would be the place. I’d replace the material things in my life with the spiritual.

In the Benedictines, I discovered a remarkable community filled with loving kindness. Each day was rich with meaning and prayer. I was the junior monk by almost 30 years, so I was the lowest person in the pecking order, just a happy grunt trying not to screw up.

I assumed the senior monks knew about bookkeeping and managing a budget. Within a few years, it was clear that something was wrong with the community’s finances, desperately wrong. We all worked full-time—I taught math at a private school—and we took in guests, but somehow there wasn’t enough money to pay the bills. Calls were coming in from creditors. These monks were actually getting dunned. So I volunteered to take charge of the monastery’s finances.

What I discovered was that we were under an avalanche of debt. Not just a couple of missing payments. We were deep in the red. Our religious order had a commitment to self-sufficiency. How had we gotten into this mess?