Being there in opposite

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

(Editor’s note: In 2023, the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky celebrates its 175^th anniversary.)

I understand the concept of being there in person, or in spirit. During the pandemic, I learned all about virtual presence. I had to go to a Kentucky monastery, however, to understand the notion of being there in opposite.

On a warm autumn morning during a recent visit to Gethsemani Abbey, my wife and I left the monastery church and walked west across Monks Road to a narrow trail the Trappists had delicately massaged into their pristine Central Kentucky woods. The mile long stone and dirt path twisted and turned past farmlands and ponds, up rickety wooden steps, and then through a thicket of brush, trees, and…statues.

In between colorful poplars, maples, and oaks, we saw Jesus, the Good Shepherd, Mary, Saint Francis of Assisi, angels, the first disciples, the cross, and a variety of other spiritual images. We also stumbled upon an old shack. Inside was a weathered wooden desk covered with handwritten notes passersby had left hoping the good monks would remember them in their prayers.

William Coolidge, a Thomas Jefferson descendant and a founder of the Minute Maid orange juice company, commissioned and donated the bronze art at the end of this unique monastic trail. Sculptor Walter Hancock, one of the original “Monuments Men” who protected, retrieved, and preserved European art in the waning days of World War II, created these statues.

Hancock called his bronze works “The Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane,” and included images depicting an anguished Jesus—and his sleeping disciples—the night before his crucifixion. Trinity Church in Topsfield, Massachusetts is home to the original set of Hancock’s statues. Hancock, however, also created a duplicate set for placement at Gethsemani Abbey in March of 1966. 

The artist and the benefactor dedicated both sets of statues to the memory of Jonathan Daniels, an Episcopalian seminarian who died in 1965. Daniels is at the heart of an American Civil Rights Movement story I had never heard until I walked upon this old Kentucky monastery trail.

Daniels was born in New Hampshire in 1939. He studied English at Harvard but then changed both his academic and spiritual course, and enrolled in the Episcopal Theology School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Before his priestly ordination, Daniels volunteered to help integrate public places and to register black voters in Alabama.

In August 1965, Daniels and some companions went to Fort Deposit—33 miles south of Montgomery—to picket some white-only stores. Local police arrested the activists, transported them in a garbage truck to another town, and held them for almost a week in a building with no air conditioning. After their release, the protestors had no transportation back to Fort Deposit. 

It was a hot day, so while waiting for their rides, Daniels and Father Richard Morrisroe—then a white Catholic priest from Chicago—walked with two teenage black girls to get cold soft drinks at a nearby store. A menacing local man with a pistol and shotgun met them there, and blocked the entrance. 

The man threatened them, aimed at one of the girls, and then pulled the trigger. Daniels pushed the young black girl to safety. As he did, the shotgun blast hit him, killing him instantly. Father Morrisroe grabbed the other girl and tried to run. The gunman shot him in the back. 

Both girls were safe, and a wounded Morrisroe survived. Martin Luther King, Jr., later called Daniels’ sacrifice “one of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry.” Today, the Episcopal Church venerates Daniels as a martyr. The statues trail at Gethsemani Abbey honors him too.

I was not in Alabama with Daniels on that horrible fateful day of his martyrdom, but I can understand some of what his last hours might have been like simply by imagining the antithesis of what I saw and felt on the monastery grounds now dedicated to him. 

The trail of statues is a serene and tranquil place. During our recent walk, soothing silence embraced and calmed us, an ambient solitude pierced only occasionally by birdsong and the abbey’s gentle church bells. It was nothing like the violence, terror, despair, and angst that likely permeated Southern Alabama during Daniels’ final walk a half century ago.

Indeed, for us the Gethsemani trail was as poignant and peaceful as Daniels’ death was senseless and stupid. The statues were as uplifting as his death was dispiriting. They were as quiet as his death was disturbing. The statues and surrounding woods were as meaningful as Daniels’ death was mystifying.

I am not a man blessed often with deep insight, epiphany, or revelation, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. Such was the case when—while walking in the woods west of Kentucky’s Gethsemani Abbey—I suddenly understood how profound it is to know something by encountering its exact opposite.

***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.