By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
I knew all but two of the nine good men who served as abbots/superiors at the now-closed Holy Trinity Abbey in Huntsville, Utah. What I do not know, but often wonder about, are some of the details of their relationships with the monks they led. Thus, a recent gift with some relevant insights, a 2016 book by Dean Lucas called Merton’s Abbot—The Life and Times of Dom James Fox, fascinated me.
Brother Colombo Weber from Kentucky’s Gethsemani Abbey gave it to me. He is here in Salt Lake City temporarily on health sabbatical leave, and is a fine writer himself (see: Review of Springs of Contemplation). Soon after I got the new book, I spoke by phone with author Dean Lucas, who spent countless hours researching and writing on the very topic I had wondered about—a monk’s relationship with his abbot.
There are a number of books describing the relationship between famous Kentucky Trappist monk Thomas Merton and his abbot James Fox, who visited Utah often. The publication spectrum includes, on one side, Monica Furlong’s 1980 book Merton: A Biography, which did not depict Fox in a flattering way. On the other side, Fox thought there was a much more balanced presentation of the relationship in Michael Mott’s 1984 The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton. I am no expert on either the men or the books, so Dean’s book was a great way for me to start exploring the topic.
Dean devotes an entire book chapter to one of Fox’s “daunting challenges,” his relationship with his two famous monk/writers—Merton and Father Raymond Flanagan. Like Merton, Flanagan wrote several successful books, including the 1941 The Man Who Got Even With God, which pre-Merton also attracted many new monks to Gethsemani Abbey and brought in significant royalties.
Both writers struggled with Trappist authority, such as censors changing their prose. (See for example: My Friend, Merton’s Censor.) Flanagan often did so with a bit of Irish temper. Merton bridled at monastic rules while Flanagan felt Merton got special treatment. One monk said they had a “feud.” Despite the perceived rivalry, however, Flanagan paid kind tribute to his fellow writer after Merton died by reading excerpts from The Seven Storey Mountain aloud to the entire monastic community.
Dean Lucas’ book includes intriguing excerpts from his numerous interviews with current and former Trappist monks. These monks who knew Fox best describe him in various but interesting ways. Fox was tough, a “pre-Vatican II” abbot, expecting obedience in all things and an admirer of the now-discontinued “chapter of faults” in which monks were admonished in front of the whole community for transgressions. Fox strongly believed in penitential actions, and walked the walk, including by working outside in the winter without gloves. Not known as a “resurrection Catholic,” Fox even included the motto “God crucified” on his coat of arms and he often said, “It is only by sufferings that souls are saved.”
Fox attended the Harvard Business School before joining the U.S. Navy during World War I, so not surprisingly, his monks also say he was a shrewd, practical manager and a problem solver, orderly, well-organized, readily replacing people not doing their jobs, and effective at fundraising (including with the wealthy Kennedy/Skakel families). These monks called Fox “courtly” around women, a “religious salesman,” and a careful guardian of his monastery’s public image. Fox himself liked to say, “Father Louis and Father Raymond write books. I write checks.”
One monk called Fox impersonal and unemotional, but many others noted his great sense of humor, forgiving nature, modesty, and deep love for his monks. He had a unique diet (perhaps prescribed by a meat and potatoes Irish doctor)—steak and fries every day. The men Dean interviewed all recognized Fox’s devotion to prayer, meditation, and Jesus. My friend Brother Luke Armour never forgot Fox’s simple suggestion to him that when praying, Luke should ask Jesus to love him more. Fox also was humble enough to step aside as abbot in 1968 after he decided he no longer was effective. He spent a decade afterwards as a hermit.
The Fox and Merton relationship has been described in many ways, but “complex” seems to be the adjective used most often. Furlong’s book concludes Fox unfairly held Merton back, but many of his fellow monks told Dean that the Abbot protected Merton. Several said that Merton was not easy to handle, and needed Fox to protect him, even from Merton himself.
Some of the monks Dean interviewed said Merton would have left Gethsemani but for Fox, and that Fox’s strict rules helped Merton maintain a valuable asset—the marketable mystique of a writer/monk. One also said Fox was just doing his job, “The Fox/Merton relationship is way overdone. Dom James believed that a man had his job to do. Follow the rules.”
Despite their many disagreements, there can be little doubt the two men thought well of each other. Merton served as Fox’s confessor for the fifteen years before Merton died on December 10, 1968. Fox sometimes regretted resigning as abbot, and often said Merton “would still be alive if I were abbot.” Merton rests right next to Fox (who died on Good Friday in 1987) in the Gethsemani Abbey cemetery.
Their last words to each other perhaps best express their mutual love. In early October 1968, Fox wrote to Merton in Asia explaining he may have appeared—falsely—to be Merton’s nemesis, but instead, “You never had, nor will you ever have—one, who has been a more loyal and faithful friend and brother—than myself.” Merton expressed frustration about Fox in journals and letters, but two months before he died, he responded to his former abbot’s letter by saying he “never personally resented” any of Fox’s decisions, expressed “respect” and “affection” for Fox, and concluded, “Our different views certainly did not affect our deep agreement on the real point of life and of our vocation.”
Dean’s book reminds me of what my friend—the last Utah Trappist abbot—Father David Altman once wrote about life in a monastery, “Monastic religious life is much like a marriage, where the primary focus is on efforts to make relationships work, and this is challenging work. It costs great effort at times to practice love in the context of stability.” (See: The Value of Monasticism.)
Fox probably would dislike that we all are dissecting his relationship with Merton or even writing blogs like this one. As Dean’s excellent book notes, Fox wanted his monks to be “unknown, unheralded, and unsung.”
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (found here), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, will be published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.
