By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Salve is a versatile word.
In Latin (pronounced “sal-vay”), it is a greeting and a welcoming phrase, derived from the verb for wishing someone health and wellness. In English and French (pronounced (“sav” to rhyme with “lav”), it is a noun for something that calms, soothes, or heals. And in one quiet, unnoticed corner of the world, it refers to a window, a song, and a monk with all those same wonderful effects.
When Trappist Catholic monks from Kentucky came west in 1947 and started a new abbey in Huntsville in rural Northern Utah, they built a Quonset hut church where they could gather pray and chant eight times a day. They carved out a huge picture window in the front, to let in the mountain light and air.
For many years, a life-size white statue of Mary, imported from a monastery in France, stood in front of this clear glass picture window. This lovely work of religious art has her own interesting back and front stories (see: statue, part 1 and statue, part 2).
Sometime in the early 1960s, a mighty wind roared down from the heights of nearby Monte Cristo and shattered the window into hundreds of pieces. The supplicating monks dodged and ducked flying glass, but did not miss a beat of their morning chant. Afterwards, they boarded up the large window frame.
The abbot at the time, Fr. Emmanuel Spillane, turned to his Southern California roots for an appropriate replacement. He hired a Los Angeles artist named George D. Merrill, whose stained glass graced a number of temples, churches, museums, community centers, and synagogues in the Golden State.
For the Utah monastery, Merrill designed a glorious image of Mary—the patroness of all Trappist abbeys—holding her son Jesus. The monks installed the work in the mid-1960s and called it the “Salve Window,” in praise of Mary. It soon became an iconic image of the beloved Ogden Valley abbey.
The Salve Mary’s countenance is welcoming and compassionate but regal too. She wears a golden crown and a robe of yellow, green, and white, trimmed with various shades of turquoise, purple, and pink.
Mary tenderly cradles her red-clad baby while deftly restraining a sinister, slithering gray snake coiled under her bare foot. Branches of red light emanate from her core and multiple shades of soft blue sky surround mother and child, cushioning their every movement.
Every night before going to bed, the monks of Utah’s Holy Trinity Abbey gathered before their Salve Window. They said goodnight to Jesus and asked God’s protection for the night.
Then, before ringing the angelus on their big church bells, and following a longstanding monastic tradition, the Trappists sang a Salve hymn, called “Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy.” In Latin, the monks chanted:
Salve, Regina, Mater misericordiæ,
(Hail, holy Queen, mother of mercy.)
vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve.
(Our life, our sweetness, and our hope.)
Ad te clamamus exsules filii Hevæ,
(To you do we cry, poor banished children of Eve.)
Ad te suspiramus, gementes et fleetness
(To you we send our sighs, mourning and weeping,)
in hac lacrimarum valle.
(In this valley of tears.)
Eia, ergo, advocata nostra, illos tuos
(Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes )
misericordes oculos ad nos converte;
(of mercy towards us.)
Et Jesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui,
(And Jesus, the blessed fruit of thy womb,)
nobis post hoc exsilium ostende.
(Show him unto us after our exile.)
O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria.
(O clement, o loving, o sweet Virgin Mary.)
(You also can listen to another group’s beautiful version of this song here Salve, Regina, Mater misericordiæ.)
This is how and when the eleven-year-old me first met the Trappist monks a half century ago—singing a cappella to their Blessed Mother Mary. In the coming years, I’d hear them lift their tenor and baritone voices to her hundreds of more times. When they did, they lifted my own spirits too.
We were a family beset with divorce and uncertainty, truly banished children of Eve in a valley of tears. We found stability and friendship with the Utah monks. I tell the story of this unusual boyhood in my book Monastery Mornings (Paraclete Press 2021).
During those formative years, I became lifelong friends with many of the monks, including one named Fr. Patrick Boyle. (You can read more about his background here: The monsignor and the monk and here: The Home Run Monk.)
He joined the Utah abbey in 1950 and for the next seventy years threw himself into the Trappist life of ora et labora, prayer and work. He cleaned barns, fed animals, and harvested crops. He kept the abbey chapel in order.
Fr. Patrick spent most of his time, however, praying for the thousands of people he greeted and blessed in the abbey bookstore. He was a natural “outside monk” for the abbey. He cared about people.
When he met someone, he’d say, “When you walked through that door, Christ came into this room!” Towards the end of any meeting, he’d tell his newfound friends, “You are right where God wants you to be.” He’d say goodbye by proclaiming, “This moment was a gift!”
People would remember, even several years later, the precious few minutes they spent with Fr. Patrick.
Although I knew him well when I was a boy and young man in the early 1970s, in some ways, I knew him better the last five years, after the abbey closed in 2017, when he and several other monks moved to a retirement home in Salt Lake City.
Once a week or so, he’d call on the phone, and always say, “Mike, do you remember me? I’m the old man in the old folks home!” He ended each call with a blessing, after leading me in another Salve, the “Hail Mary” prayer.
He was never my counselor, confessor, or spiritual advisor. We were friends. Some of my favorite memories involve just chatting with him during visits, or when I took him to doctor appointments, or when we drove back and forth to Huntsville for an occasional picnic on the old monastery grounds.
I’d ask how he was doing, if he was adjusting to life outside after so long in the abbey. Fr. Patrick said it was a “piece of cake.” He’d explain, “The past is past, God will take of the future, and so I just live in this moment.”
He’d tell me stories about his life as a monk and before he joined abbey. He’d ask about me, my work, and my family (he knew them all). He filled our encounters with smiles, laughter, and kindness.
Upon reaching age 94, as he struggled to stand, walk, and get in/out of my car, he told me what it felt like to be in the tenth decade of life. He’d explain (only partially in jest) how “the first 100 years are the hardest.” Then, he’d look me in the eye and remind me, “Life is good, and you want to know something? You’re good guy!”
That kind-hearted man’s life, as we all knew it on earth, ended on August 13, 2022. After Fr. Patrick’s funeral mass, while sending his body off to the Huntsville monastery cemetery, Salt Lake City Bishop Oscar Solis and his brother priests did something I did not expect.
They sang:
Salve, Regina, Mater misericordiæ,
vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve.
Ad te clamamus exsules filii Hevæ,
Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes
in hac lacrimarum valle.
Eia, ergo, advocata nostra, illos tuoi
misericordes oculos ad nos converte;
Et Jesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui,
nobis post hoc exsilium ostende.
O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria.
I was astonished and delighted as this come-full-circle moment unfolded before me. It turns out that the first song I heard the monks sing also was a splendid final tribute for my friend.
Fr. Patrick was kind to, and interested in, everyone he met. He wished them well no matter their origins or beliefs or state-in-life. When he spoke, he tried to calm or soothe. And in his prayerful petitions—Latin or English, sung or silent—before the monastery’s lovely stained-glass window, he always sought to heal.
Salve is a versatile word indeed. It refers to a greeting, a wish for wellness/health, a balm, a song, and a window. And it is a pretty good adjective for an uplifting monk I knew too.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here: https://michaelpobrien.com/) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. 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, was published by Paraclete Press in August 2021 and chosen by the League of Utah Writers as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
(Note: when the Huntsville monastery closed in 2017, the Utah monks and the current monastery landowners Bill and Alane White donated the Salve Window to Holy Family Catholic Church in South Ogden, Utah.)
