'Ghana,' replied Father Maurus, explaining that he's been invited to spend a few months helping with a religious community in one of the remoter areas.
     'But the London train's just left,' she said.
     'Ah yes,' replied Maurus. 'But I have no money for the journey yet.'
     She looked at him, momentarily perplexed.
     'I was just waiting for the Lord to send you along so I could ask you to buy me a ticket for the first stage of my travels.'
     Despite the religious nurturing and the regular stream of intricate and lengthy letters from Father Maurus, when Peter grew up and moved out into the world he began to leave the practices of his faith behind. As an adult, like many others – though perhaps more thoughtfully than most – he joined the legions of the lapsed. It was, in his case, a curiously 'conscientious' separation. He felt unable to believe and unwilling to employ the rituals in the absence of a core belief.
     Father Maurus and Peter's mother did what devout people are supposed to do: they continued to love him in their various ways, and they prayed for him. Throughout university and the jobs at which he worked, Peter remained in touch with both his family and his former spiritual mentor. He worked in several parts of the world, eventually settling back into the community in which he'd been raised, living in a rambling old house just outside Elgin. He had a job in the whisky industry, took part in local activities and during an election campaign outraged some of his neighbouring squires by attaching a 'Vote Labour' poster to the driveway gates. Comfortable among the people with whom he had grown up and confident that he had found the place and the career he enjoyed, there was still a sense of the restlessness about Peter which had earlier led him to travel extensively. Moray was his home and his base but it was clear that he felt there was yet more to be sought. And in the prime of his life he intended, one day, to seek it.
     And then, aged 34, he got cancer.
     He had recently married when the first diagnosis was made. It was, said the doctors, an unthreatening cancer, one of the few most likely to respond to prompt treatment. So following upon surgery and radiation therapies, he returned to work, his marriage and his life with some optimism.
     Once or twice a year, he would see Father Maurus at family ceremonies – weddings, baptisms, funerals – and despite his lapsed faith they remained on good terms. He made donations to the Pluscarden community and the monks quietly continued with their work of rebuilding their abbey, farming the land and offering succour to the needy.
     A year later, when the cancer returned, it had metastasised in a more threatening way and Peter agreed to undergo the radical and debilitating treatments on offer. He declined the well-meaning friends who offered magical cures, the high-tech US hospitals which only dealt with VIPs and all the other medical and anecdotal snake-oil salesmen who seem, with best intentions, to emerge when distress strikes. He continued to work as best he could, but in the long winter months between treatments, he quietly and diligently set about organising matters for a less certain future.
     It was during this period that I happened to have dinner with Rita, an actress friend, and her husband. I told them of Peter's struggle with the advancing tide of illness and of the doctors and others who kept offering him glimpses of hope. I also told of the weekend he stayed with us when he picked up a spoon instead of a fork and couldn't quite understand why he was having difficulty cutting his meat. Of how he now put his hands on my shoulder – I can still feel the touch – to ensure that he didn't stumble as we walked down a long passageway. Of his frailty and his quiet courage.

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