Out of Order (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780648582205)

Rob Donnelly entered a contemplative Catholic monastery in his early twenties. He stayed for nearly a decade. Then, in a break that surprised those around him, he left.

Out of Order is a spare, unsentimental memoir of a young man's search for belonging inside the walls of a religious order-and what happens when the voice that once led him to surrender begins to fall silent. With clarity and psychological precision, Donnelly traces the slow work of disillusionment, the disintegration of certainties, and the quiet necessity of stepping away from a life once held as sacred.

This is not a tale of scandal or lost faith. It is something more difficult: a reckoning with obedience, solitude, rupture, and the long, hidden labour of returning to one's own voice.