Onion rings and eternal life

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

A recent ordinary moment with my friends, Utah’s Trappist monks, now is an unexpected and extraordinary reminder of the essence of their unique monastic life.

In August 2021 Paraclete Press published Monastery Mornings, my memoir about growing up with the monks at the Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity in Huntsville, Utah. The monastery closed in 2017. The new book is my small way of helping the world remember the kind and gentle men who lived there.

When the Northern Utah abbey closed five years ago, eight of the surviving monks moved to a Salt Lake City retirement home that could provide the geriatric care they needed. Five of those monks, all but one above age 90, were still alive when we published Monastery Mornings in 2021.

There have been many fun activities associated with the publication of that book. My favorite event, however, was in late August 2021. Bill White—my friend and the current monastery land owner/steward—and I took four of the monks out to lunch to celebrate the book launch.

I picked up and drove Father Alan Hohl and Father Leander Dosch to the lunch. Bill transported Father Patrick Boyle and Father David Altman. These monks always have appreciated anything you did for them, so they were delighted with the good but modest restaurant we choose for the outing. They ordered simple meals with tea, beer, or wine.

And they loved the onion rings appetizer I ordered and shared, a food item that probably was not standard monastery fare.

We enjoyed a wonderful afternoon together, with lots of fellowship, laughing, and good conversation. Afterwards, we took the four monks back to their small apartments and I gave them each a copy of the book. They were excited to see their stories in print.

Father Patrick Boyle even let me photograph him while he previewed a few pages. He asked me to get extra signed copies of the book for the monks at Kentucky’s Gethsemani Abbey, of which the Utah monks now are a part. It was a memorable day.

Unbeknownst to all of us present, it also was the last lunch we would have together. Within five months—during a cold, dark, long, and difficult pandemic winter—we had lost two of the monks to COVID-19. They were the same two men I drove to the August lunch.

Father Alan Hohl, a kind and gentle former Navy pilot from Wisconsin, was the Utah abbey’s cantor and an expert on water and irrigation (see: Fr. Alan Hohl: Utah’s Trappist Bud). He died on December 16, 2021 after living six decades as a monk. He is buried at the monastery cemetery in Huntsville.

Father Leander Dosch, from Canada, was a priest for 70 years (see his obituary here). He worked in schools, and with the poor in Brazil, before joining the Utah abbey in 1975 where he served six years as abbot. He left us on January 2, 2022 and is buried at the lovely Mount Calvary Catholic Cemetery in Salt Lake City.

Just as I helped both Father Alan and Father Leander into and out of my car for our late summer book launch lunch, a few months later I helped carry them, in simple wooden coffins, to their final resting places.

Now, the photo album in my head keeps placing snapshots of the happy lunch scenes right next to the stark burial scenes that followed. The juxtaposition makes me sad, but it also brings to mind three great lessons the monks taught me: nothing lasts forever, every moment is a gift, and the best is yet to come.

In a 1947 article (“Death of a Trappist”) published by Integrity magazine, Kentucky Trappist monk/writer Thomas Merton explained, “There is no need for a man to make his drinking cup out of a skull in order to remind himself of the elementary fact that he will not live forever. But, nevertheless, we all need to be reminded of it.” For Trappist monks, a lifetime of ora et labora is that constant reminder.

Yet, they also consider each such moment of prayer and work to be a gift. As a result, and as explained in Monastery Mornings, for a Trappist “death is not a sad event, but the fulfillment of a lifelong yearning for a deeper relationship with God…Trappists are not morbid and do not actively seek out death. When it arrives, however, they do not fear it as an enemy, but instead welcome it as a beloved brother.”

In his 1947 “Death of a Trappist” article, Merton describes this welcome moment far better than I ever could: “At last the body breaks like a web and the soul leaps out, exulting like a flame into the blinding glory of God.”

I am forever grateful that my friends now exult in blinding glory. I think I got a little taste of Heaven, however, when we ate onion rings together first.

*Mike O’Brien (author website here) 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, was published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.