CHAPTER 7: LIVING IN COMMUNION 205 he expresses a profound love and gratefulness towards his own tradition, which made it unthinkable to him to leave that church: I have the impression… that the church in which I’ve grown up was the one which gave me what I need to live my faith, so, where I received the Baptism, uh, made me become so a Christian, and um… that if I received that from this church, if we want to use the church as the mother {laughs}, as Calvin would do, uh, anyway, uh, one cannot forget his own mother, so to, this dimension of fidelity, to, yes, to the personal, in this case not a person, but uh, the institution, which… gave me the first milk, and then made me grow up, um… I, I thought, for me, it would have been uh, un~, so I would not have felt well to, to go to… yes, I would have this impression that this transplantation, so to say, would have not been natural for me, so… I would have had the impression always to be a stranger, at least from… Not having done it, I think I would have thought that, but {laughs}….463 BE agrees that he might have joined a Reformed monastery in Germany had he known of their existence. He encountered Bose first, however, and compares his experience with falling in love: opting for Bose was not a rational decision against other communities but based on a sense of feeling at home in this particular monastery. The fact that BE did not have to give up his own ecclesial affiliation has played an important role in this process. In a similar fashion, TA says: “one thing that helped me was that I never had the impression like, wait a minute, this choice implies a renunciation of the tradition I come from.”464 Instead, through his non-Reformed contacts, BE developed a new and deeper understanding of his own Reformed identity: Strangely… the… first years of being here… I discovered {laughs} by the contact with, or the daily contact with not-Reformed, so with Roman Catholics, the fact, more and more the fact that I was belonging to that church, so, so, it was something, I discovered my being Reformed in contact with non-Reformed, so to say. Not as a reaction, or something, yes sometimes, of course, you have some initiate reactions in front of some words, or some behaviors, which you don’t feel as… as yours, because you never had to, to, to, you never met them in your previous history, um…but, yes, but rather the 463 BE-1,28. 464 TA-1,22.
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