Excess (StoredStory #1)

The darkness had just begun to soften the long, hot late summer day. His Trappist habit almost touched the floor, the fronts of his shoes barely poking out from underneath the snow white tunic. We began with the sign of the cross, and he uttered words with his deep bass voice, a thick Bostonian accent, from pages of Modernist poetry. He loved Pound and Yeats. At some point in the talk, Fr. Kelty said, "Ne quid nimis." This was the first time I heard these words from Terence. "Nothing to excess," he explained. I think of this often, and it has been dancing around in my head since yesterday as I had begun to think that even well-intentioned principles can be taken to excess and become damaging. Perhaps, Aristotle's Golden Mean is something to think about.