By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
As I have noted previously (see: The 12 weeks of Christmas romance novels), when my agent Joe Durepos suggested I write a novel that included a romance storyline, I thought he was a little bit crazy. It’s not something I’d ever done or even contemplated before.
Soon, however, I was the crazy one…crazy about the book idea and crazy busy writing it. And why not? Love, in all its forms, makes life worth living, and that in turn makes love worth writing about.
The result? A delightful new holiday romance novel tentatively called Merry Matchmaker Monk. Now Joe and I are now working to get it published.
In Merry Matchmaker Monk, Katie Sullivan is an independent red-headed rescuer who needs, but resists, her own rescue. By chance she meets Henry Gleason, a gentle lawyer who has let life’s sad turns bury him and seems unable to dig back out. As a Christmas present, their common friends—some kind Trappist monks who’ve known them all their lives—arrange for them to work together on a children’s holiday program at the school where Katie teaches. Led by the wise old Father Jerome, the monks know that often the best way to deal with your own problems is to try to help someone else.
The two young people clash and cooperate about the big event, compose a catchy new Christmas carol together, and even discover a mutual attraction. Yet, powerful outside forces and conflicting emotions conspire to pull them apart. The intriguing plot thickens when Katie’s old boyfriend—an attractive wealthy doctor and land developer—makes a radical proposal that could forever change Katie’s life and legacy, as well as transform the pastoral landscape of her childhood.
Only at midnight on Christmas Eve will we know what paths Katie and Henry will choose, whether the old monks’ clever matchmaking plan has worked, and if the gift of love might arrive in the charming snow-filled mountain valley that they all call home.
When you read it, I think you’ll fall madly in love with an appealing young couple, wise old matchmaking monks, a beautiful pine-filled Utah alpine valley at Christmastime, a catchy new carol, and a unique part-Dickens-tale/part-Hallmark-movie storyline.
Some might think it a rather unusual decision, however, to include monks and a monastery in a story about romance. But again, why not?
Granted, monks do not live or love in the manner of the typical romance novel plot—girl meets boy, girl likes boy, girl loses boy, girl gets boy back, girl/boy live happily ever after. Yet, many monks I’ve met know far more about love than most people.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the greatest monks of all time, liked to call his monastery a school of love. Another renowned monk, Thomas Merton, explained in The Seven Storey Mountain, “The Monastery is a school….What we have to learn is love.”
Merton also wrote in Love and Living, an essay published after his death, “Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone—we find it with another.”
Yes, in a monastery, people learn how to love. To love God. To love themselves. To love others. And once they learn those lessons, most monks and nuns reflect back, to everyone they meet, the most beautiful kind of selfless and devoted love.
Brother Nicholas Prinster—a monk I knew from the old monastery in Huntsville, Utah—expressed this notion in some of the loveliest ways I’ve ever heard: “There are only two profound tragedies in any life—not to love and not to tell those we love that we love them.” He also wrote, “We are all of us broken. We live by mending, and the glue that we are mended with is the grace of God, and what is the grace of God but love?”
In his 1986 book Monastic Practices, Father Charles Cummings (another Utah monk I knew) also wrote eloquently about the essence of true mutual love, “I cannot always expect to be the receiver of love, unless I for my part am first the giver of love.”
These are profound insights, the macro-notions of love.
Yet, because for over a thousand years monks have lived in community, they also understand what I call the micro-notions or building blocks of love. Monks know, by sheer necessity if nothing else, what little acts of love can build and maintain human relationships.
Father Charles wrote, “Outside the monastery it is often difficult to find a community of love. People act at cross purposes. To risk a generalization, the spirit of contemporary society is one of indifference, competition, and greed, not of love and mutual help.”
He thought we could do better, and described love as “serving one another, helping someone who needs help, or doing something extra for the benefit of all, whether it is to tidy up a mess, haul out the trash, or clean a sink and toilet. Love is practical and willing to do its good works without being seen.”
Indeed, monks often say that love and community grow from simple behaviors like common courtesy, kindness, patience, acceptance, forgiveness, and not judging.
Another Utah monk, Father Brendan Freeman (on whom I based the Father Jerome character in Merry Matchmaker Monk) illustrates one of these practical notions in his 2010 book Come and See: The Monastic Way for Today. In my favorite passage, Father Brendan first quotes St. Augustine, “Men are strange creatures, the less they focus on their own sins the more they focus on the sins of others.”
Father Brendan continues, “There must be hundreds of Desert Fathers’ sayings that forbid us to judge our brother. The best way to do this is not by making a firm resolution not to so act, as if willpower alone could achieve this. The best way to keep from this vice of judging others harshly is to be acutely aware of our own failings and sins. Hold them like a sack in front of our face, not like a sack slung against our back. On our back, we might forget they are there. In front of our eyes, we cannot forget them.”
This profound understanding…of the essence of love and of the very practical elements of what makes relationships work…qualifies monks for many important roles in life besides monking. I think one of them is helping others find love too.
What better matchmaker than a graduate of the school of love?
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
