A pandemic of lilacs

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

Standing in my makeshift COVID-19 basement home office one recent overcast day, a rather dismal conversation stormed in my head. Death tolls. Infections. Risks. Layoffs. 60 days (and counting) of quarantine. Boredom. Social distancing. Thankfully, the clouds lifted for a moment when I heard another internal voice say, “if you don’t like what is being said, change the conversation.” I asked (again, in my head), “it is really possible to change a pandemic conversation?”

The answer arrived a few moments later when I glanced outside my temporary office window and saw my neighbor’s lavender lilacs in early bloom. I was supposed to be working, but I succumbed to this blissful distraction, and my mind raced back forty years to a letter that an old monk sent me.

Father Jerome Siler was a Trappist who lived at the now-closed Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah. I spent many happy boyhood days there in the 1970s and 1980s. I did not know Father Jerome well, however, until I after left Utah to attend college at the University of Notre Dame. During my college years, Father Jerome and I were pen pals.

Father Jerome was a pioneer monk, one of thirty three men who left Kentucky’s Gethsemani Abbey in 1947 to travel across the country by train and start a new monastery in rural Northern Utah. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and served as an English Army chaplain during World War II. He lived and studied in Jerusalem, Egypt, and Northern Africa before joining the Trappists. 

Born in 1901, Father Jerome was in his late seventies when I first knew him. His vision was failing. My mother, a medical records secretary, tended to him after he had cataract surgery at the hospital where she worked. Mom brought him ice cream during his inpatient convalescence and they became friends. Afterwards, he often called her at home just to check on her well-being and to ask about my college adventures.

Because of his ongoing eye problems, he wore thick glasses and often walked in a bashful, tentative, and uncertain manner that reminded me of the befuddled cartoon character Mr. Magoo. Looks are deceiving—he was a scholar and the Abbey’s librarian. He also tended to the monastery’s lilac bushes.

The lilac, or syringa vulgaris, has a long and colorful history. The plant is named after the nymph Syringa, who according to Greek mythology transformed herself into the flowering shrub to avoid the lustful god Pan. Lilacs originated in Asia and in Eastern Europe, where they were used in funerals. In Victorian England, however, they represented first love. Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson wrote about planting lilacs in their gardens. Father Jerome wrote about lilacs too.

In the spring of 1983, I sent the monks an invitation to my college graduation. In response, Father Jerome wrote me a letter, addressed to: “Dear Michael, Dear Friend.” He thanked me for “including your Holy Trinity Brothers in your mailing list,” and sweetly said, “I would do anything to be present to see you arrayed in scholastic attire on that long-looked for day of graduation.” After telling me he would keep me in mind (and in his prayers) on commencement day, he also recounted the latest happenings at the Abbey. He saved for last the most significant announcement: “The real good news is our lilac is now full of buds!”

A monastery is not an easy place to live. Like the rest of the world, it is full of imperfect people and imperfect interactions. Kentucky monk and writer Thomas Merton thought these imperfections were “much smaller and more trivial than the defects and vices of people outside in the world: and yet somehow you tend to notice them more and feel them more, because they get to be so greatly magnified.” Said another way, again according to Merton, “People even lose their vocations because they find out that a man can spend forty or fifty or sixty years in a monastery and still have a bad temper.” (Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, 462).

Despite whatever tensions or imperfections occupied his life when he wrote my letter, Father Jerome was able to fill his eyes and mind with lilac buds. “Pandemic” comes from the Greek “pandēmos” combining pan, which means “all,” and dēmos, which means “people.” In short, pandemic really just means all people. I have a hunch all people can do the same thing Father Jerome did.

How can we change our current conversation—at least from time to time—away from only fear, depression, and death? What if, instead, we saw and discussed a pandemic of roses? (See Hope grows with the roses ) Or of simple pleasures? Or human resilience? Or increased time together with our quarantine companions? 

Or what about a pandemic of courage by so many in the face of existential dread? Of gratitude for the unsung heroes around us? Of not taking things for granted? Of honoring and celebrating the lives lost? Or of coming together with the common purpose of picking up the pieces shattered all around us?

Father Jerome, as the Trappists say it, graduated to Heaven in 1987. His letter to me—four years earlier and four decades ago—and his sweet, simple, charming, childlike exuberance over a few emerging flower blossoms, convinces me it is possible for all people to change the pandemic conversation.

I am going to try right now by looking out my makeshift basement office window. I hope to see a pandemic of lilacs.

*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is writing a book about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah.