By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
The photo is like an impressionistic painting, where blurred images somehow manage to depict clear reality. Or, in this case, reality transcended, for it is my friend Brother Boniface going to Heaven.
He was a transplanted New Yorker, a simple Trappist monk who lived in rural Huntsville, Utah for sixty years. He was tall, thin, and had a ruddy complexion and angelic blue eyes. When I was a boy and then a young man, I spent many hours with him and knew him well. I worked with him. He was my friend and my mentor.
After I married and had three children and a more-than-full-time job, the busy-ness of my life limited our time together. He persevered in his life of solitude, work, and prayer. Before I realized the rapid passage of time, he was old, sick, and then in 2006 dead. In the typical quick and low-key Trappist manner, he was buried before I even knew he was gone.
I missed the funeral. Thankfully, my friend Don Morrissey, a longtime volunteer librarian at Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity, was there and took the photo just hours after Boniface’s death.
As is the Trappist way, his fellow monks held an all-night vigil, taking turns praying beside his lifeless body and saying good bye to their brother. With Boniface in the photo is Father Malachy Flaherty. This fits, because in 1947 Malachy and Boniface traveled together to Utah from Kentucky to start the Huntsville monastery. (See: Father Malachy’s trees).
Kentucky monk and writer Thomas Merton, who Boniface knew when they both were at the Abbey of Gethsemani in the mid-1940s, poignantly describes the immediate aftermath of moments like the vigil captured by Don’s photo. Merton wrote, “And as you walk through the dark echoing cloister you are no longer afraid of death or of dead bodies, but you see them as they are—sad, inevitable things whose sorrow is not without an infinitely merciful remedy.” (“Death of a Trappist,” Integrity: November 1947)
Within a few hours after Don took the photo, Boniface was buried in the stark and distinct Trappist style—in his worn white monk robes, face hooded, laid directly into the ground with no coffin, ashes to ashes, and dust to dust. Again, Merton’s words enlighten: “this simplicity and poverty have something about them that is immensely clean in comparison with the nightmare of fake luxury and flowers with which the world tries to disguise the fact of death.”
As probably happens with so many of us who lose a loved one, I still mourn Boniface’s passing over twelve years later. But I grieve more for the time we could have shared, but did not spend together. Why didn’t I write or call more? Why didn’t I go visit him at the nursing home?
Don’s painting-like photo of his death, which sits enlarged and framed on a table in my study, stills those anguished voices of regret and comforts me. It is my last and lasting image of Boniface’s final days, and it’s hard to picture a better one. Merton tells me that the photo shows my friend Boniface as his “body breaks like a web and the soul leaps out, exulting like a flame into the blinding glory of God.”
Friends want their friends to have their heart’s desire. This is what Boniface wanted. This is that for which he lived. And so the beautiful photo makes me sad, but it also makes me smile.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (found here), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, was published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.
