Guideposts – August 2019

GUIDEPOSTS (^) | August 2019 17
As a monk, he took a vow of poverty.
But he learned that didn’t mean money wasn’t important
BY DOUG LYNAM, Santa Fe, New Mexico
F
ROM 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 man-
agement company. Sound like two com-
pletely 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 worry-
ing about money than anyone.
Right after graduating from college
with a math and philosophy degree, I
decided to enter a Benedictine monas-
tery. 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 lov-
ing 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 com-
munity’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?
The brothers had clung to the hope
that prayer alone could solve our prob-
lems. We viewed money as the root of
all evil. Somehow there was the trust
BUDGET WISE
NEW CALLING Today Doug helps people get
financially healthy.
spiritual wealth