The young monk took his placement at the monastery and he was assigned by the Abbot to help the other monks to copy the old canons and laws of the church by hand, a procedure that the monastery had been following for centuries.
He noticed, however, that all of the monks were copying from previous copies, not from the original manuscript.
So, the new monk went to see the Abbot to question this, pointing out that if someone made even a small error in the first copy, it would never be picked up! In fact, that error would be continued in all of the subsequent copies.
The Abbot told him that they had been copying from the copies for centuries, but he made a good point.
The Abbot decided to go down into the dark caves underneath the monastery. where the original manuscripts were held as archives in a locked vault that hadn’t been opened for hundreds of years.
Many hours went by and nobody had seen the old abbot.
So, the young monk, who was worried, went down into the caves to look for him.
Down in the caves, he was surprised to see the Abbot banging his head against the wall and wailing, “We missed the ‘R’, we missed the ‘R’!”
The Abbot’s forehead was all bloody and bruised and he was crying uncontrollably.
The young monk asked the old Abbot, “What’s wrong, father?”
With a choking voice, the old Abbot replied, “The word was… CELEBRATE!”
Image used under a Collective Commons License from https://pixabay.com/photos/franciscan-monk-verna-monastery-191383/