Financial Wilderness - Reflections by Brother Luke
When I was a youngster growing up in Los Angeles back in the 1950s, during Easter Vacation as it was then called, our family would go down to Anaheim to pay our annual visit to Disneyland. One of the rides was through a House of Horrors, where at every turn some new and scary figure would jump out at you. The first few years of our new beginnings at New Skete felt as if we were traveling through a House of Horrors. Challenges came at us from many directions.
Only when we had to take responsibility for all the management of the monastery did we come to realize how little we knew about managing our affairs: financial, legal, medical, and administrative, not to mention spiritual. From the founding of the monastery up to this point, authority for all these matters had resided with the Abbot. Now we were on our own!
To keep paying the bills we needed to figure out our finances. To the extent we had house financial records, many of them were hand-written. However, it was not unusual for withdrawals to be poorly annotated—if at all! We had no real accounting system for the monks’ house accounts. We also discovered that not all of our savings had been deposited in bank accounts! As a former student of the Middle East, I had read stories about the Sheikhs of the Arab Emirates of the Persian Gulf in the mid-twentieth century keeping their oil revenues under their mattresses. These stories no longer seemed so funny, or so distant! The Farms’ accounts were a bit better, as this was a for-profit business, and income taxes were paid. So in light of all this, we made the decision to engage a professional accounting firm to help us craft a chart of accounts for our corporations and to help us learn how to properly account for all our financial activities. This raised the question: what accounting firm? We had no idea who to contact. None of us was a financial specialist.
So, we did what people often do. We turned to friends for advice, and in this case, we turned to friends we knew through our work with dogs. They happened to have a vacation home in our neighboring village, Shushan, New York. But the accounting firm’s offices were in New Jersey. Not the most convenient connection, but we felt comfortable with them. In a crisis, comfort borne out of friendships can override other considerations.
In crafting a chart of accounts for us, we needed to provide the accountants with our best estimate of the income and expense items we wanted to keep track of. Again, we really did not know much about bookkeeping beyond some very basic notions about income from donations and some sales through our gift shop and the usual expenses for running our house: food, clothing, maintenance on the buildings and grounds. Pretty minimal. We also did not know whether there were special considerations due to our status as religious and monastics. So, we looked for religious friends to help us by example. If we knew what other monastic houses did, we could follow suit. We had some connections with the Trappists at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, so we turned to them for advice. To our great relief and joy, they were willing to meet with us to discuss these issues and share with us their experience. So we slowly began to get a handle on our finances. And it was none too soon, because some very large expenses were looming: some we knew about and some we would soon confront because of legal challenges.
Next: The Agony and the Ecstasy
