By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
The old Huntsville Trappist monastery gave the surrounding community a number of unique and special gifts. One gift was the many interesting persons who visited the monks at the now-closed abbey.
Catholic saint Mother Teresa was there fifty years ago in 1972. A few years earlier, Dorothy Day came to see the monks. And when another well-known visitor named Bede Griffiths arrived in 1974, East met West in Northern Utah.
Griffiths was a British Catholic priest and a Benedictine monk. He also lived in ashrams (monasteries) in India, became a noted yogi, and was a leader of the Christian Ashram Movement.
Born Alan Richard Griffiths in December 1906, he grew up in relative poverty. Yet, he showed early academic potential and won a scholarship to Oxford. While there, The Chronicles of Narnia author C.S. Lewis tutored and befriended him.
After earning his degree in journalism, Griffiths was drawn to the communal life. He lived with two other men in a monastic-like setting in a Cotswolds cottage. They sold milk from their cow for income.
Hearing a call to pursue this life further, in 1932 he joined a Catholic Benedictine monastery and took the religious name “Bede,” which means “prayer.” Bede was ordained a priest in 1940.
For many years, Bede was interested in and studied Eastern spirituality. His monastery leaders eventually gave him permission to live and work at Christian abbeys in India. While there, he took up the ascetic life.
Griffiths renounced all possessions, and dressed in the kavi (the orange robes of Indian ascetic monks). He adopted the Sanskrit name Swami Dhayananda (“the bliss of compassion”), and wrote several books and articles trying to harmonize the spiritual practices of the East and the West.
Although Bede recognized the differences between Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, and Muslims, he also saw how they all sought to awaken a mystery within. He found a unity in a common way they searched—with stillness, prayer, and meditation.
Bede often traveled though the United States teaching and talking about these unifying concepts and ideas. During one such lecture tour in 1974, he stopped at the Abbey of the Holy Trinity monastery in Huntsville in Northern Utah.
The Christian swami knew Trappists well. In 1958, Bede helped one Trappist monk start an ashram in India. He also met with Thomas Merton at Kentucky’s Gethsemani Abbey in 1963. Merton’s journal described Bede as a “very good, ascetic, thin, quiet man.”
The Trappist abbot during Bede’s Huntsville visit was Father Emmanuel Spillane. He joined the Utah abbey in 1950, leaving behind what newspapers called a ministry as a “Hollywood priest” and as a “spiritual advisor to many screen notables” in California. The monks elected him abbot in 1956.
One of the few monastic leaders to serve before, during, and after the Second Vatican Council, Father Emmanuel took to heart the Council’s words in its “Declaration on Non-Christian Religions,” known in Latin as Nostra Aetate.
Nostra Aetate proclaimed, “[T]he Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in [other] religions.” Vatican II encouraged Catholics to “recognize, preserve and promote the spiritual and moral values as well as the social and cultural values to be found among them.”
Father Emmanuel often talked about Eastern and Western thought. In one memorable homily I heard in the 1970s, he reminded his monks about Mahatma Gandhi’s admonition that more people would be Christian if more people were Christ-like.
In a 1976 lecture at Salt Lake City’s Westminster College, Father Emmanuel said that the West had the “religions of the word” and the East had the “religions of silence.” But he added, “The word can only be heard in silence.”
Given their shared affinity for Eastern spirituality and for the Western contemplative life, Father Emmanuel likely was delighted when Bede Griffiths visited Huntsville. Bede’s longtime friend, an Indian Christian, Benedictine monk, and yoga master named Swami Amaldas, joined him on the 1974 visit.
Father Emmanuel invited the men to speak at a special outdoor morning mass on the guesthouse front lawn at the Huntsville monastery. Participants in the Mass—including several Trappistine sisters—wore a red bindi (“point” or “dot”) on their foreheads.
The bindi is used to enhance one of the seven main chakras—areas of concentrated energy—in the human body. In Hindu spirituality, this “third eye” is the soul’s vision, facilitating inner wisdom and allowing truthful, unbiased sight.
Bede’s trip to Northern Utah was short, less than twenty-four hours, but it lives on in one of the most intriguing photos I have seen in the old abbey archives. Before departing, Bede and Amaldas posed with Father Emmanuel and other guests visiting the monastery. They all are smiling and wearing the third eye.
After leaving Holy Trinity Abbey, Griffiths continued his work building bridges between East and West for another two decades. He told people that he was “a Christian in religion but a Hindu in spirit.” Bede died on May 13, 1993, at Shantivanam (“forest of peace”), his Benedictine ashram in South India.
Father Emmanuel led the Utah abbey for another decade, until 1983. After he retired from leadership, he worked as the monastery guest master and served as chaplain for the Trappistine sisters at Santa Rita Abbey in Sonoita, Arizona. He passed away in 2010.
As a young boy visiting the Huntsville monastery, I often wondered what my monk friend’s unusual moniker—Emmanuel—really meant. Father Emmanuel showed me often…that the divine lives everywhere in everything, and that indeed “God is with us.”
Bede Griffiths delivered the same basic message when, wearing colorful saffron robes and a red dot in the middle of his forehead, he brought the mysteries of the East to the old American West in remote and rural Northern Utah.
*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.
