By Michael Patrick O-Brien–
For winter, here is a cold weather excerpt from Monastery Mornings, my 2021 memoir about growing up at the now-closed Trappist monastery—Abbey of the Holy Trinity—in the rural mountains of Northern Utah.
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The monastery was symbiotically married to the natural world that surrounded it. This was especially true in winter.
Huntsville is in a mountain valley. Cold weather temperatures can be harsh and winter conditions unforgiving. A 1951 newspaper report noted that on one frigid day, temperatures plunged to forty degrees below zero at Holy Trinity Abbey. The Ogden Valley’s average annual snowfall is over six feet. From December to February, the average low temperature in Huntsville, with its elevation at just under 5,000 feet, is a mere nine degrees above zero. The average high is barely above the freezing mark. I even remember some cold summer monastery mornings in Huntsville.
I do not like to be cold. Given this thermal inclination, for two or three months of the year, my personal search for truth and meaning at the monastery coincided with, and at times was replaced by, an urgent search for heating vents. This was not exactly a new quest for me. At home, during the winter months, I often wrapped up and sat on heating vents, using a blanket to capture the heat and create a bubble of warm air. On cold school-day mornings, I locked myself in the bathroom and fell back asleep on the vent. This irritated Mom to no end, because she was trying to get me to school on time. She pounded on the door, reminded me of the time, and demanded to know if I had gone back to sleep. With a weak and drowsy voice, I denied dozing off and then finally started getting ready for school. She predicted that my own kids would do the same thing to me some day and then I would know how she felt. They did. I do.
One of the monks told me the story of how difficult it was during their first winters in the Ogden Valley. Not only was it cold, but they were living in thin-walled, surplus wooden military barracks with a barely functioning temporary heating system. In the face of these challenges, one clever monk volunteered to tend to the chickens during this time. Going above and beyond the call of duty, he quite willingly spent extra hours on the job in the well-heated coop hatchery with his fine-feathered friends and their eggs.
My own search for Holy Trinity heat ended not in the chicken coop, but in the elegantly simple monastery church. The beautiful church was large, stark, and quite cold. One frigid winter’s night we arrived there early, for Compline, which would not start for another thirty minutes. The church was completely dark and overwhelmingly peaceful and quiet. Mom and [my sister] Karen went upstairs. I decided to stay downstairs and check out something I had noticed hidden in a corner. It was a flat-topped, metal box, strategically positioned in an out-of-the-way space under the stairs. Eureka! A heating vent of some kind.
I strolled over and sat on it. Nothing. I waited. Nothing. I started to give up and leave when I suddenly heard a staccato set of clicking sounds. They were strange and non-rhythmic. Click. Click, click, click, click. Click, click. I sat there, eagerly anticipating. All at once, almost miraculously, hot air began to flow out of the vent slats. I was warm, deliriously and deliciously warm. I sat there for several minutes, under the stairs, in the dark, staring at a solo candle burning on a nearby altar. My head grew heavy and my body light. My soul seemed to levitate and I experienced what may have been a deep mystical feeling. Or perhaps I just dozed off for a few minutes. Either way, it was divine.
Thereafter, on each winter evening when we visited the abbey, you could find me, in a similar “mystical” state, under the stairs in the back of the church. Sometimes the heater did not run, which was disappointing, but often it did. My relentless search for heat had an unexpected side effect. I came to cherish the stillness and solitude of a hushed and darkened space, illuminated solely by the flickering light of a single burning candle.
*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.
