Quote from Letter to Leander, most reverend and most holy brother and fellow-bishop. July 595
I (have) exposed to your ears everything that I disliked about myself, since I had put off the grace of conversion for a long time, and to a great extent, and ever after I was inflamed by a love of Heaven, I thought it better to wear secular clothing. For what I was seeking concerning the love of eternity was already being revealed to me, but an ingrained habit had prevented me from changing my external attire. And when my mind was still forcing me to serve the present world, as it were superficially, then many things began to build up against me from the same worldly concern, so that I was held back in it now, not by its outward show but, which is more serious, by my thoughts, But finally I fled anxiously from all of this, and looked for the haven of a monastery, leaving behind what belonged to the world, as I then mistakenly thought. From the shipwrech of this life, I came out naked. For as a wave, once a storm has built up, often shakes a careless tethered boat even from off a bay on the safest of shores, so I suddenly found myself in an ocean of secular cases, under the pretext of ecclesiastical rank. As for the peace of the monastery, because when I had it, I did not hold on to it firmly, it was only when I lost it that I realized how tightly it should have been held.
Cited from: The Letters of Gregory the Great, trans. John R.C. Martyn (Toronto: PIMS, 2004), II, 379
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