“Cistercians believe that people can change”

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

The Trappist monks at the old Huntsville, Utah monastery made various promises to God and each other when they joined the abbey. Some of the most interesting stories from their seven decades in the Ogden Valley, however, involve not how the monks kept their vows, but how those vows influenced others.

One such vow/covenant is called the “conversion of manners.” The monks describe it this way: “Cistercians believe that people can change. Each of us takes a ‘vow of conversion’ by which we promise to live the monastic way of life as a means of learning the truth about ourselves.” This model of personal conversion had a remarkable effect on many monastery visitors.

One of them was a convicted thief named Phillip R. Harris, who I wrote about here. He served time in a California prison, but was paroled in 1956 to go to a job in Los Angeles. Instead, Harris went to the Huntsville monastery. He told the Utah monks his story and asked to join their order. The monks said no. They told Harris he first had to “pay your debt to society and make yourself square with the world!”

Harris remained at the monastery for several more weeks, while the monks fed and housed him. He worked odd jobs to earn funds to return to California, where he turned himself in. Inspired by the Trappists, Harris told the police, “I want to get this thing squared away. I’m capable of being good; I know that, but right now I have a very low opinion of myself.” 

A few years after these remarkable events occurred, Kirk Probasco was a kid growing up in Huntsville. Kirk and his friend Richard Sorensen often rode their bikes to the monastery to get bread or honey for the Sorensen family store known as “Leon’s Market.” Years later a grown up Kirk, now an ordained Presbyterian lay minister (deacon), often brought addicts and alcoholics to Holy Trinity Abbey.

Kirk believed the monastery was the perfect setting for step 4 (“make a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself”) and step 5 (“admit to God, to myself, and to another human being the exact nature of my wrongs”) of the AA 12 steps program. He told me that the “recovery community” loved the monks as “gentle, beautiful people who just cared about their well-being.”

Perhaps that compassion is what made Jerry LeBeau, also a recovering addict, a frequent monastery visitor in the late 1980s. LeBeau was beloved by his many friends, who called him the “Bear.” A newspaper article once described LeBeau as “one of Salt Lake City’s model citizens. He founded a Narcotics Anonymous chapter, belonged to Alcoholics Anonymous, served food to the homeless at a local soup kitchen, and cooked free dinners for local residents on holidays.”

LeBeau was best known for his work with the local Alano Club. The Alano Club provided information/assistance about alcoholism and addiction, was a meeting place for recovery groups, and served as a clean and sober environment where addicts/alcoholics and their families could enjoy recreational and social activities. LeBeau was involved in many of the club’s service projects.

Yet, LeBeau also had a dark and unknown past. His real name was Daniel Eugene Binick. Binick had a lengthy jail and criminal record—mainly for burglaries committed to feed a drug habit—in his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland.

Binick also was a suspect in the 1975 murder of a tavern owner shot in the back during a robbery. In the late 1980s, as fugitive warrants and the law closed in on him, Binick considered running away. Instead, he did something unexpected. He went to the Huntsville monastery again.

I do not know exactly what happened there, but contemporary news reports called it “a soul-searching visit.” Binick talked with the resident Trappist monks and priests and then turned himself in. A Maryland newspaper reported that he gave up “after spending a week with monks at a monastery in the Rocky Mountains.”

After Binick surrendered to the FBI in March 1988, he told the Associated Press he was tired “of living under a shadow and looking over my shoulder all the time.” He returned to Baltimore and pleaded guilty to second degree murder. His confession might have ended his life story, but his decision to surrender and his devoted volunteer service in Utah gave him another chapter.

In Binick’s extradition papers, Utah Governor Norm Bangerter included a letter noting an outpouring of support for Binick by the many people he had helped. Friends wrote to the Maryland court on Binick’s behalf. The Salt Lake Tribune even mentioned him in a May 1988 editorial: “American justice would be harsh, indeed, if it didn’t exercise compassion and give credit to people who so distinctively demonstrate their remorse and determination to atone for even the most grave mistakes.”

In November 1988, a Maryland judge gave Binick a suspended jail sentence, required him to pay 20% of his future salary into a restitution fund for police officers killed in the line of duty, and ordered him to return to Utah to do community service. Binick happily resumed his work at the Alano club in Murray.

I wish I could say that Daniel Eugene Binick’s life was easier from that point on, but it probably was not. His lifelong battle with drug addiction and alcoholism continued, and eventually the disease ended his life in October of 1999 at age 52. The Alano club hosted his memorial service.

Given his rollercoaster of a life, one might ask whether Binick really was the lovable Bear, or the service-minded LeBeau, or the recidivist fugitive from justice. Brother Nicholas Prinster from the Utah monastery knew the answer. He once wrote, “It’s not a simple thing to be a human being. We all have many persons inside of us. Who is the real person? They all are.”

The Trappists gladly shared such simple truth with their visitors, including with people like Phillip Harris, Kirk Probasco’s recovering alcoholics, and Daniel Eugene Binick. And they usually also shared a formula for change in the face of truth. Brother Nicholas once said it this way: “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?”

How did these simple farm monks from an obscure corner of the world acquire such wisdom? Was it from a book? Was it divine revelation? I think it was more experiential, and much more personal. It turns out that one learns a thing or two during a lifetime spent trying to keep a promise to seek the truth about yourself and to change.

*Mike O’Brien 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.