By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
No one reaches the lovely Santa Rita Abbey—the only Trappist monastery in the American Southwest—without taking some kind of a journey.
Mine started at another monastery, 800 miles north, in Huntsville, Utah.
As described in Monastery Mornings, my 2021 book about the Utah monks, I basically grew up at Holy Trinity Abbey in Northern Utah. The monks there talked often about their friends, the women living as Trappistine sisters at Santa Rita.
The Utah monks took turns journeying to the abbey near Tucson to help their sisters with various tasks. Some monks would serve as chaplains and others would assist with accounting or business duties.
Another Utah monk helped establish an irrigation system for the monastery in the arid desert landscape. The Utah abbey also helped fund construction of a new Santa Rita family guest house, replacing the double-wide trailer used since the 1970s.
The long road between Tucson and Huntsville went both ways, of course. The sisters drove north too, and made retreats or attended meetings at the Utah abbey. Both communities fondly cherished the mutual friendship.
As the Utah abbey was closing around the year 2017, Sister Vicki Murray from Santa Rita came north to check on her religious brothers. My wife (also named Vicki) and I met and started a friendship with her then.
We also promised to visit her beautiful abbey. We almost made it in the Fall of 2021, but one of many COVID-19 outbreaks during that pandemic year forced us to postpone.
We finally made the trek in early December 2023, some fifty years after Sister Vicki’s first trip.
In February 1972, Sister Vicki journeyed to Tucson with six other Trappistines from St. Mary’s Abbey in Wrentham, Massachusetts to found Santa Rita. (We visited Wrentham in the Summer of 2023.) The abbey started with a four-room ranch house on 120 acres.
Sister Vicki had not yet made her final vows. In April 2023, she told a local newspaper that for traveling and photos, she was “promoted for the day” and got to wear a black instead of white scapular and veil. “It was short-lived,” she said. “After the photos, they said, ‘Okay, time to give back the black habit with leather belt!’”
Sister Vicki eventually earned both of them back and spent the next half century living, praying, and working in the Arizona desert. “I fell in love with the desert immediately—the vastness, the silence,” she told the local newspaper.
“For me the desert has been a great teacher. It looks like nothing much is happening, so brown, everything looks dead. But there is so much life when you learn to see better. The plants and animals teach you.”
After working most of the jobs available at the monastery, including in the bakery making the altar breads used in masses all over the country, the Santa Rita sisters elected Sister Vicki as prioress—leader—of the abbey in 2012.
Our recent journey to see Sister Vicki and Santa Rita started with a snowstorm in our hometown Salt Lake City. We survived the winter weather, a long rental car line in Phoenix, and a dark drive to arrive safely in Tucson.
The next day, our Saturday morning trip to the abbey—nestled in the mountains near Sonoita—was under bright sunshine, blue skies, and warm temperatures. Spanish records referred to this mountain range as the Sierra de Santa Rita as early as the 1760s, but the name’s origin remains unknown.
The indigenous Tohono O’odham people call the mountains Ce:wi Duag (pronounced “choo duh awg”) which translates to “Long Mountain.” The Western Apache name for the Santa Ritas is Dzif enzho or “Beautiful Mountain.” (See Who named the mountains?)
After about 45 minutes on pavement, we reached the two-mile dirt road that leads from Highway 83 to the abbey. As we bounced along at a much-reduced speed, we passed classic western place names like Ophir Gulch and the Sleeping Dog Ranch.
Madera Canyon—a world-renowned bird watching spot—is close by. A few more miles down Fish Canyon Road, we could have visited a ghost town, an old gold mining settlement called the Kentucky Camp.
Instead of visiting either of these intriguing sites, we followed hand-painted signs and turned off, onto another dirt road. It led us uphill and to the mesa on which Santa Rita Abbey sits.
From an altitude of 5,000 feet, the spectacular mesa overlooks gulches and grassy hills covered with scrub oak, juniper, and agave. We saw grazing cows and several white tailed deer, but none of the scorpions, rattlesnakes, javelina (wild pigs), black bears, or mountain lions also known to inhabit the area.
We were a little early for our scheduled meeting with Sister Vicki, so we stopped in to visit the small but serene Santa Rita church. Several times a day, before a simple petrified wood altar, the dozen or so sisters chant the psalms there.
While in the church, we met Sister Esther Sawal, the resident sculptor of the community, who was preparing the sanctuary for Advent. Born in the Philippines, she took her own long journey to reach Santa Rita.
Sister Esther studied art in Milan, Italy, and worked in liturgical art and church interior design for 14 years with another religious order. Eventually, she felt a calling to a more contemplative life and came to Santa Rita in 1986.
Today, Sister Esther blends her native Filipino traditions with her adopted Southwestern Native American culture to create beautiful and expressive clay sculptures. Her work includes nativity scenes, saints, and scriptural reflections.
During our brief conversation, Sister Esther was delighted to hear any news we could share about the Huntsville monastery and the many monks she knew as friends who lived there. She called them “my beloved Utah brothers.”
Turns out Sister Vicki had a bad cold on the day of our visit, and she quite generously did not want to share it with us. Sister Pamela Fletcher capably filled in for her, serving up tea, delicious homemade peanut butter cookies, and wonderful conversation.
Sister Pam grew up locally, but felt a strong call to the contemplative life. She journeyed to Santa Rita from another faith tradition which did not offer a monastic vocation.
By any definition, Sister Pam is a true renaissance woman. She is a skilled photographer and manages the abbey website. She leads the daily abbey chants with her beautiful voice.
Sister Pam also is quite good with hand tools. She recently fixed one of the abbey’s bread-making machines with the translation help of another sister who was on the phone relaying instructions from the French company that built it.
The abbey website lovingly notes, “If she has a fault it is that she has too many projects going all at the same time and is trying to get them all done before Vespers tonight!”
Sister Pam spent many happy hours in weeklong retreat visits to the Utah monastery. As we ate cookies and drank tea, we shared lots of fond memories about the wonderful men who lived at that beautiful place.
The time passed so quickly that we almost made Sister Pam miss the abbey’s midday prayers at noon. Fortunately, we all made it, with mere seconds to spare.
After a short walk on the abbey grounds, my wife Vicki and I completed our journey to Santa Rita full of joy and peace, and with the sisters’ chants echoing in our ears and hearts.
In his early journals, Thomas Merton—the Trappist brother to Sister Vicki, Sister Esther, and Sister Pam—wrote, “For although God is right with us and in us and out of us and all through us, we have to go on journeys to find him.”
Although Merton did not live long enough to go there, I think the good Trappist monk from Kentucky had Santa Rita Abbey in mind.
*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.
