By Gary Topping–
Almost any bucolic setting will have a calming effect on our too-busy, too-complicated lives. Even a cow pasture does it for me, and I’ll go so far as to admit to loving the smell of cow manure—a quirky taste which I will not urge upon you!
That calming effect is intensified on the grounds of a monastery. God is everywhere and can be experienced anywhere, but he seems so much more accessible where one is surrounded not only by Nature but also by the prayers of those who have consecrated their lives to him. Mike O’Brien, in his splendid Monastery Mornings (which I am now reading for the third time), quotes Father Brendan Freeman to the effect that “There is indeed a presence of the Holy in the hills and valleys, the sky and mountains sitting so majestically right before our eyes in the Ogden Valley.” (p. 177) Thomas Merton agreed on the calming effect. “The [monastery] bells remind us,” he says, “that business does not matter.”
My memories of Huntsville, Utah’s Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity are quite limited compared to the days on end spent there by Mike. In fact, I only visited it twice. But on the second visit, there was certainly some kind of Catholic pixie dust in the air that had people doing things I had not expected.
My first visit was uneventful, though I still cherish my memories of that first encounter with a monastery. I went there on that occasion with my fellow graduate student at the University of Utah, George Pence (now a fellow Boy Monk blogger). We were enrolled in one of Glenn Olsen’s medieval history courses and Professor Olsen had learned that the monastery library contained a book that George would find useful in his seminar paper. During our stay we observed the monks chanting one of the “little offices” (probably Midafternoon Prayer). Never, in the most fanciful flights of my imagination, did I ever suppose that many years later, as Archivist of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City, I would become the custodian of two of those huge, steel-bound books from which the monks were reading their chants.
I do vividly remember (the crazy things that stick to one’s flypaper memory!) an extra-large jar of peanut butter sitting open on one of the tables in the refectory, as though it were waiting to be joined by a chunk of the famous monastery bread. I have a similar crazy memory of a box of Cheerios sitting on a kitchen counter in Bishop George Niederauer’s residence in Federal Heights. Monks eat peanut butter! Bishops eat Cheerios! It seemed to humanize them so much. By the time George Pence and I left the monastery it was late in the day and we had had nothing to eat, so we bought a loaf of that wonderful bread and munched on it as we negotiated that crooked road down Ogden Canyon. By the time we reached the city of Ogden, it was all gone.
My second visit was memorable because it had a pretty comical ending. It was in the late 1980s, as I was nearing the end of my tenure as Curator of Manuscripts at the Utah State Historical Society. Our local archivists’ organization, the Utah Manuscripts Association, held one of our quarterly meetings at Weber State University, where another graduate school chum of mine, John Sillito, was the university archivist. John had developed contacts with some of the monks, and he arranged to charter a school bus to take us to Huntsville for a monastery tour. I was probably the only Catholic in the group, and I looked forward to sitting in on, once again, midafternoon prayer. When that was done, the agreed-upon hour of our departure had arrived, so we went out and boarded the bus. But two of our members had disappeared! We waited and waited, and finally someone decided to go hunt them down. They were both in the bookstore. One of them, a colleague of mine at the Historical Society, was a woman who had been raised in a Presbyterian parsonage and later, during a rough time in her life, had converted to Mormonism. She had never said a good word about Catholicism in all the years I had known her, and yet here she was, loading up on religious medals and holy cards and such stuff to the point where she was delaying the departure of the bus! The other missing one was a fellow who had been raised a Catholic, graduated from Catholic school, and eventually converted to Mormonism. He was agitatedly running around trying to find a priest to bless a St. Christopher statue he had bought!
Catholic pixie dust indeed.
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles.
