Grandfather Gethsemani

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

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

During an unusual boyhood that followed a difficult family divorce in the 1970s, Northern Utah’s Trappist monks served as my surrogate fathers. As a result, my recent (and first-time) visit to the Kentucky monastery that sent those monks to Utah over seventy-five years ago was like meeting a grandfather.

My memoir Monastery Mornings (Paraclete Press 2021) explains in more detail how I’ve known the monks from the Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity in Huntsville, Utah for a half century. The monks are members of the thousand-year-old Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, but also called “Trappists” after their famous La Trappe Abbey in France. 

Trappist monks arrived in Utah on July 10, 1947, sent by what then was a very overcrowded Abbey of Gethsemani near Louisville. Founded 175 years ago, Gethsemani Abbey is the oldest Trappist monastery in the United States. 

I’d heard about Gethsemani as a boy because of its close connections with the Utah monks. At their annual founders’ day celebration, the Utah Trappists always ate chicken from KFC. Thus, my boyhood impressions of the entire state of Kentucky probably were formed mainly by monks and by Colonel Harlan Sanders, who had his own unique connections to Utah (see: Was the first KFC really in Utah? – Deseret News).

Gethsemani’s story starts with a few Trappist monks from Europe who lived for a short time south of Louisville in the early 1800s. They came at the invitation of Father Stephen Badin. Badin, the first Catholic priest ordained in the United States, also built a lakeside log cabin chapel at my alma mater—the University of Notre Dame. 

Eight of those original Trappists are buried, along with heroes of the American Revolution, at the Holy Cross cemetery near the site of the first Catholic Church built in Kentucky 230 years ago, in 1792. Bad floods, however, drove the other original Trappist monks back to Europe. 

Four decades later, the Abbey of Melleray—founded about 1130 in Bretagne, France—sent four dozen monks to Louisville to try once again to establish a Trappist monastic presence in America. In 1848, these men arrived on a tract of land they bought from the Kentucky Sisters of Loretto. The sisters called the place “Gethsemani.” 

It was a difficult time, and a perilous journey, for those immigrant monks. France was lurching towards yet another revolution and the seeds of civil war were germinating in the United States. One brother died during the Trappists’ three-month-long 1848 voyage, led by Gethsemani’s first abbot Eutropius Proust. 

After crossing the Atlantic, these pioneer monks traveled through New Orleans and up the Mississippi River on the Martha Washington steamboat. They arrived in Kentucky just in time for Christmas in December 1848. Eventually, they built a stone abbey on several hundred acres in the rolling hills of Central Kentucky.

While the American Civil War raged, the Kentucky monks showed Christian hospitality to both sides. Slowly but surely, what started as a distinctly European abbey transformed into a uniquely American institution, culminating in the 1935 election of Frederic Dunne, the first Cistercian abbot born in the United States.

Gethsemani Abbey also grew—and then exploded—with new recruits during and after World War II. One such recruit was the now-famous monk/writer Thomas Merton. 

Merton’s bestselling 1948 autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, and his 1949 book The Waters of Siloe, include wonderful lyrical descriptions of the abbey of that era. When Merton joined the monastery and the outside gates locked behind him, he explained, “I was enclosed in the four walls of my new freedom.”

I first learned about Merton from the Utah monks. Some knew him personally. Even as a youngster, I liked to write too. Knowing that one could be a monk and a famous writer was quite intriguing. Merton, however, was not the only well-known Gethsemani writer. 

Before him, Trappist Father Raymond Flanagan (originally from Massachusetts) already had published Three Religious Rebels, a book about the founders of the Cistercian order. The Utah monks gave us a copy of Flanagan’s The Man Who Got Even With God, the story of a wild Texas cowboy who became a saintly Gethsemani monk. Flanagan would go on to publish several more books, including one about Abbot Dunne.

That fine tradition of monastic writing continues today at Gethsemani, thanks to poet-photographer-writer-monk Brother Paul Quenon, who knew both Merton and Flanagan. Quenon’s 2019 memoir In Praise of the Useless Life won numerous awards. His collaborative work with my friend Judith Valente, How to Be: A Monk and a Journalist Reflect on Living & Dying, Purpose & Prayer, Forgiveness & Friendship, is a treasure.

Brother Paul provides one of the best descriptions I’ve heard of the purpose of life, whether in or out of a monastery. He says, “The purpose of life is to live your life.” To cherish this and other pearls of monkish wisdom, I brought his book with me when I went to Gethsemani so I could read them all on the abbey grounds where he wrote them.

With all this monastic history in mind, my first trip to Gethsemani Abbey in October 2022 was both new and familiar, much like a pilgrimage to see the beloved grandfather you admire, but rarely visit. Gethsemani discharged its ancestral duties quite well.

Before we even got there, Brother Columban (“Colombo”) Weber gave my wife Vicki and I some good tips for an enjoyable Kentucky visit. Brother Colombo—the first Gethsemani monk we met—has read and commented on several of my writing projects.

Once we arrived in Kentucky, the monks welcomed us warmly, hosting us in their family guesthouse on a hill with a spectacular view of the abbey. The setting and hospitality were simple yet extraordinary. 

Brother Colombo’s good friend—the delightful choirmaster Brother Luke Armour—took us under his kind black-and-white-robed wings, showed us around, shared memorable meals with us, and even gave us an impromptu organ concert. 

We met several other Trappists too, including the only monk still living who joined in the abbey from the 1940s, the decade when Utah’s Holy Trinity Abbey was established. 

We chatted briefly with former abbot Father Timothy Kelly, the man who visited Utah’s abbey as its “father immediate” in the 1970s and 80s. We probably met each other in Huntsville when I was a boy and he was a much younger priest.

The most wonderful part of our visit to Gethsemani Abbey, however, was the monks’ chanting and bellringing. The abbey bells gently cajoled my wife and I awake at 3 a.m. each morning and then both charmed and calmed us several more times thereafter each day. They sounded much like the old monastery bells in Utah, which I miss so much (see: The Bells of Brother Nicholas).

The Kentucky monk chant was lovely, and reminiscent of the Utah monksong I first heard as a child. The monks ended each day with compline—from the Latin word for “completion”—chanting in darkness in the same way I remembered from the past. I enjoyed sharing this moment with my wife, who knew the Utah monks but never heard them sing.

After a tribute to Mary, the patroness of all Trappist abbeys, the Kentucky monks rang the angelus on their bells and then did what they had just sung about from the Fourth Psalm: “I will lie down in peace and sleep comes at once, for you alone Lord make me dwell in safety.” We did the same.

The Kentucky bells and the Trappist chants rocketed me back in time a half century to my boyhood in Huntsville, Utah. As I listened and watched in Gethsemani, over and again I recognized the same kind, unique, and benevolent features in my grandfather Gethsemani that I had loved in my Holy Trinity father. 

I think there are many wonderful things about abbeys and monasteries. The best one, however, just may be that the Trappist acorn does not fall far from the Cistercian tree.

*Mike O’Brien (author website here: https://michaelpobrien.com/) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings (https://www.amazon.com/Monastery-Mornings-Unusual-Boyhood-Saints/dp/1640606491), 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.