✙ help once, double your impact

First of all, you are in no way required to help me. With God’s (+) help I think I can manage on my own.

But if you have the means to help me without denying yourself anything because of it. And if you feel that in our current society it might be important and fruitful what I do. And you understand that I can use all the help I can get because otherwise I wouldn’t be living in my car. And last-but-not-least you understand that it will be rather difficult (read: impossible) for me to obtain a mortgage without my former worldly income. Then, yes, your help is more than welcome. And obviously necessary.

Because  - to make matters more complicated still - canon law (the law of the Roman Catholic Church) explicitly excludes the right to any kind of (financial and practical) support to hermits. That type of help is only reserved for the priests. However, God (+) did not call me to be a priest. And looking back on my first six years as a hermit: not being part of the priesthood might be part of His (+) providence. But financially it’s difficult. Because given my daily schedule (see here) there is no way for me to keep on living this life of a traditional solitary hermit, while helping others for free (as both the Bible and the Desert Rules command, and most people expect), while also saving for my old age, and acquire a hermitage without a mortgage.

So the question has been for a long time now: how to get myself out of this live-in-my-car-as-a-hermitage, without violation of the applicable Dessert Rules for begging? In other words: how can I adapt the traditional Dessert Rules for begging (you can find those on the top of this page), to the social financial and ecclesiastical realities of our 21st century, without losing Christian values? Because as cardinal Seán Patrick O’Malley phrased it: “Poverty does not always lead to love, but love always leads to poverty, to the poor, and to God’s little ones”. Having found out that cardinal O’Malley’s general sense of direction is correct, a viable and honest solution fitting our current era had to be found one way or another.

And I think, after prayer and discernment, that I’ve found just such a viable and honest solution that is also in accordance with the Desert Rules for begging (you can read those in the orange square at the top of this page).

This solution is that upon receiving your one-time financial support, I will:

  • Immediately store it in a separate account dedicated to helping me acquire a hermitage

  • Then, when I’ve found a hermitage, I will inscribe your name - together with the names of all other benefactors - in the head and sides of the front door frame, in remembrance of God’s and your loving kindness, and as a permanent call to gratitude and prayer 

  • And last-but-not-least, I’ve now stipulated in my last will (drawn up in 2025 by a notary) that within 12 months after my death any hermitage I might possess must be sold on the open market, and that - within the following 12 months after completing the sale - the full proceeds of the sale must be distributed in person among the local poor.

Structured like this, your financial support will - in fact - have a double impact. First by helping me. And then upon my death by helping the local poor. And in between, the positive effects of your financial support will continue for a very long time to come. Because it will not only help me find a stable and suitable place as a hermit, but obtaining such a place will also significantly increase my ability to help others improve and deepen their daily prayer life in order to enable them to live a more fulfilling and effective Christian life in this world through self-emptying, dispassion, and unconditional love. And on top of that, the monetary value of your financial support will increase in value with the yearly value appreciation of the hermitage. This way, the purchasing power of your original financial support to buy the hermitage will over the years keep pace with (and on average probably outgrow) the inflation rate during my lifetime. Therefore, upon my death, your original financial support - including its yearly value appreciation as described above - will have grown in size and all of it will upon my death be transferred in whole to the poor as stipulated in my last will. In other words, with just a one time donation you will make a lot of impact, on many people, during a lot of years.

And although I do not know God's (+) accounting principles, based on the Bible and on the Desert Rules specified at the top of this page, I have to trust and believe that God (+) will recompense you accordingly. Therefore not only because of your financial support to me, but also because your donation will during my lifetime have a continuous pro rata beneficial effect in enabling me to help others as a hermit. And last-but-not-least because at the end of my life your donation (grown in size with the value appreciation of the hermitage) will be distributed - out of your name - to the local poor. In other words: I trust that your financial help will before our Heavenly Father (+) also not bear just one but a threefold reward for you personally.

If this proposal makes as much practical and Christian sense to you as it does to me, then you are very much welcome to become a material and indispensable part and guardian angel of my journey. And if it doesn’t make sense to you, then feel wholeheartedly and sincerely free to ignore this proposal and - if desired - ask me for my help anyway when you want.

double impact & triple reward

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to beneficiary: bartholomeus

IBAN: NL31INGB0008149596

with the description:

double impact - for hermitage and the poor

How much is needed?

For the last two years now, I've been living in my car, which means I live cook sleep pray and store my things in a driving hermitage of about 3 square meters (plus a driver's seat).

Traditionally, this is not so strange nor so hard as it sounds, as many hermits lived in hollowed out trees, similar sized 'coffins', little graveyard monuments, etcetera. Basically accepting anything functional in order to enable themselves to devote as much time as possible to their solitary vocation, humbly and steadfastly accepting all its negative consequences for their worldly status and comfort.

In other words, a hermitage doesn't need to be big. But something more stable and healthy than my current situation would be better. And it should be situated in a silent and isolated area.

Having looked around for options to establish a hermitage, by far the most suitably small options are unfortunately mostly situated within urbanisation. And otherwise, the options that are ideally situated in silent and isolated areas tend to be mostly bigger sized houses. Nonetheless, it seems a suitable trade off between both location and size can be found within Western Europe for between €100.000 and €300.000 depending on size and on whether it needs a lot of construction work or none at all. All in all, I will need around €200.000,- in the form of external financial help.

This means that in order to realise my proposal set out above, I'm looking for your one-time financial support in one of the following orders of magnitude:

  • 5 x €40.000,-
  • 10 x €20.000,-
  • 20 x €10.000,-
  • 40 x €5.000,-
  • 80 x €2.500,-
  • 200 x €1.000,- 

However, I’d like to repeat: you are in no way required to help me. With God’s (+) help I think I can manage on my own. But if you have the means to help me without denying yourself anything because of it. And if you feel that in our current society it might be important and fruitful what I do. And if you like to be a part of that, then all help is very much appreciated.

Thank you for taking this proposal into consideration.