Priest

Benoît (Michel) Billot was born in France in 1933. After primary and secondary school, he studied physics and natural science, and then attended the Ecole Nationale d’Horticulture in Versailles. Afterward he entered the Benedictine order where, after six years’ training, he was ordained a priest.

For twenty years he ministered in parishes in Parisian suburbs, while at the same time working as a delivery man at the Halles de Rungis, the large wholesale fresh produce center serving the Paris area. He also continued studies in theology and religious philosophy at the Institut Catholique de Paris.

His appointment as Coordinator for France of the Monastic Inter-religious Dialog group (M.I.D.) from 1982 to 2000 led to several sojourns in zen monasteries in Japan.

In 1985, with a mandate from his community, he took a sabbatical, part of which was spent in the Black Forest in Germany at the Karl Graf Dürckheim Center, and another part in Bavaria, at the meditation center founded and directed by Willigis Jäger (Kyô Un Rôshi), one of the major European zen masters. He frequently returned to study under Willigis Jäger (for a total of three years) who bestowed upon him the title of zen teacher. During this period, he also undertook psychoanalysis and psychotherapy while continuing his parish activity in Choisy le Roi.

There, in 1986, he founded La Maison de Tobie (The House of Tobias) a school of spiritual life, as well as a place for discovering one’s inner self, and open to Asian spiritual traditions. With others, he directs meditation sessions and symbolic experience sessions.

A member of the Benedictine community at Saint Benoît Priory in Etiolles, south of Paris (a monastery belonging to the Congregation of the Annunciation), he is currently in charge of liturgical song and gardening. The brothers living in this monastery are “monks for the city”; some of them work in local parishes, and others in a profession.