By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Easter is delightful but mystifying. It celebrates a wonderful event, resurrection, that I’ve never seen. With no personal knowledge of resurrection, each Easter season I try just to feel it instead. This year I had help from a new film about Utah’s Trappist monks and from a walk on their old land.
John Slattery’s production company, Zween Works, previewed the new film “Present Time: Journal of a Country Monastery” this past weekend at the Compass Rose Lodge in Huntsville. The event was sponsored by Ogden Valley’s Mountain Arts and Music (see:
https://www.mountainartsandmusic.org/ ). John spent 15 years visiting and videotaping the Utah abbey and its monks before its doors shut for good in 2017. The documentary is the heartfelt product of those many visits.
Like John, I started visiting the Abbey of the Holy Trinity a long time ago. After a divorce, my mother took us kids to visit the Utah monks, trying to help heal the wounds of our family troubles. The Trappists befriended me and, for just over a decade, I grew up as a sort of boy monk. As I watched John’s film, I was a boy monk all over again.
The film took me back to the Quonset hut chapel, in the dark, and I listened to the monks chant, led by the cantor Father Alan. I was in Brother Nicholas’s wood shop, and watched him make clocks and talk about Mother Teresa’s 1972 visit to Utah. I walked up and down Abbey road, one more time, watching elk herds graze in the winter and small white butterflies flutter between green alfalfa stalks in the summer.
And once again I was with my close friend Brother Boniface. At first he seemed different. He sat on a lawn chair, just months before he passed away. He was grizzled, aged, silent, and debilitated. But as John’s camera moved in more closely, Brother Boniface was just as I knew him over 40 years ago…praying the rosary, a wry smile on his face, a mischievous twinkle in his eyes.
After watching the movie, my wife Vicki and I walked again on the grounds of the old monastery. The current owner, Bill White, is doing his remarkable best to preserve as much of the open space as possible, all with his own resources. He and his family have repaired and refurbished some of the original farm buildings. They also lovingly tend to the monks’ quaint little cemetery.
Bill doesn’t just love the land, however, he loves the monks too. He visits them at their Salt Lake City assisted living center. They listen eagerly as he gives them updates on irrigation pipe repairs and crop totals. He brings them back to Huntsville for barbecues, and they ask for extra servings of his wife Alane’s potato salad.
The moments that I spent with John and Bill over Easter weekend would be meaningful any time, of course, but they were particularly profound because I was in the middle of my annual Paschal search for proof of resurrection. I was trying to feel it.
Catholic catechism explains how “no one was an eyewitness to Christ’s Resurrection….No one can say how it came about physically….Although the Resurrection was an historical event that could be verified by the sign of the empty tomb and by the reality of the apostles’ encounters with the risen Christ, still it remains at the very heart of the mystery of faith as something that transcends and surpasses history.” (See http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p122a5p2.htm)
In the Gospels, the disciples of Jesus encountered him several times after discovering his empty tomb on Easter morning. They spoke with him, felt his love, and saw him in the breaking of the bread. Doubting Thomas even got to put his hand into the wounds inflicted by Roman soldiers.
We modern folks are not so lucky. We have no such documentary evidence. Instead, we are left to rely upon the word of others, passed down to us over centuries, and upon our own faith that resurrection, having occurred once before, is possible again for us.
There are signs of resurrection, however, in our modern world too. You just have to look for them. Resurrection happens when we remember and feel the unmistakable presence of our dearly departed loved ones. When they somehow seem to embrace us, long after returning to mortal dust, that is resurrection too.
There is something about us, about our life, about our love, that transcends death. At least that was how it felt last Easter weekend when I watched John’s beautiful film and then walked with Bill in the springtime monastic mud on the old abbey grounds.
Bill modestly dismisses his devoted efforts as merely honoring the wishes of some nice old men who want their carefully cultivated land to remain a farm. John’s website describes his new documentary as a simple poetic “chronicle of the everyday lives of monks” (see: https://presenttimemovie.com/). Both humble descriptions are accurate, of course, but these labors of love also mean so much more.
For contemporary evidence of the essence of Easter, and to sense its possibilities for today, I need look no further than John’s artistry and Bill’s stewardship. They resurrect the Utah monastery and my friends, the kind and gentle Trappist monks. I can feel it.
*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.
