By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
The Trappist monks from Utah’s Our Lady of the Holy Trinity Abbey had a remarkable ability to find common ground with others. They did with their Huntsville neighbors (see: https://www.standard.net/opinion/guest-commentary/the-monks-and-the-saints-years-together-in-the-ogden/article_6d4dcb0f-8e30-5d5e-aab6-e96c7997e4b8.html). They also did so with an Ogden poet from a completely different religious tradition.
His name is L. Mikel Vause, a distinguished English professor at Weber State University (WSU). I met him last Easter when he helped a former student, filmmaker John Slattery, screen a new documentary about the Utah monks.
Vause is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but also is a student of Thomas Merton’s spirituality. He met the Utah Trappists years ago, and felt an immediate kinship, when they hired his father to do some work at the Abbey.
Vause began teaching at WSU in 1982. According to students and colleagues, he is a scholar, quintessential storyteller, friend, environmentalist, and a “man of grit.” In granting him its highest honors, WSU has said Vause helps “students harness the power of words to gain self-confidence, achieve academic and career goals, diversify their world views and find courage in moments of despair.”
In addition to his teaching work, Vause has written articles, short stories, six books, and poetry collections. His books are available on Amazon or at Booked on 25th, a bookstore in Ogden. Vause’s poems address a wide variety of topics, many inspired by his love of mountaineering.
In 2013, he was hiking in Scotland’s Isle of Skye, slipped, and fell 300 feet. Vause survived, only to face months of surgery and recuperation. He told a local newspaper, “For six months after my fall, my eye was bad and I couldn’t read. It took that long for my concussion to calm down.”
From his scholarship, adversity, and travels, Vause has come to appreciate a life he calls “pared down to its basic elements,” where “people are highly spiritual, and live in harmony with their environment.” Sounds a bit like a Trappist monk, eh?
After we met, Vause gave me a sneak peek at his new book, A Home to Strange Animals, which he describes as an “attempt to cut away from the superfluous for the sake of simple truth.” His poems reveal a keen understanding of monastic life. Two of them specifically mention the Utah monks.
In the poem “Voluntary Isolation,” the monks utter the “Language of God” with “exhale chants.” Inviting us to consider doing the same, Vause writes that the Trappists:
“Eschew the material
To seek the spiritual
Life absent of offense
Eyes look for God”
In “Twenty White Crosses,” inspired by the monks’ quaint cemetery, Vause describes the painful but poignant 2017 closure of the monastery:
“The quiet pastoral life
About to close
Leaves only
Simple white crosses
To whisper ‘Our Lady’s story.’”
Utah’s monks and Mikel Vause have shared a common guest for God and for life’s meanings. The monks searched on a farm and small Quonset hut chapel in the shadows of Monte Cristo and Mount Ogden; Mikel Vause looked on top of those same peaks.
They all embody the spirit of Psalm 121: “I lift up mine eyes to the mountains, from whence cometh my help.”
*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, Utah.
