“Pay your debt to society and make yourself square with the world”

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

I have a rather nerdy habit of e-searching newspaper archives for stories about my old friends, the Trappist monks who used to live at Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity in Huntsville, Utah. The other day, I ran across a fascinating story of a troubled young man who visited the monastery about twenty years before me.

In 1950, Phillip R. Harris, age 20, admitted to stealing from a friend’s home in Palm Springs, California, where he was a guest. A local court sentenced him to five to life in San Quentin prison for grand theft and burglary. He was released on parole five years later to go to a job in the Los Angeles area.

Instead of reporting to his LA parole officer, however, a repentant Harris made his way to the Utah monastery and tried to enter the Trappist order. An Oakland newspaper telling his tale reported that the order’s monks “never speak, sleep on boards and get up at intervals during the night to pray.” Harris apparently saw such a monastic life as an attractive alternative to the path of crime and incarceration he found himself traversing. 

He told the Utah monks his story and, at age 26, asked to be admitted as a member of the Abbey. The monks quietly but firmly told Harris no. They told him he needed to fix his problems first. Harris remained at the monastery for several more weeks, while the monks fed and housed him. He worked odd jobs to earn funds to pay for his return to California. 

Eventually, in 1956, he hiked through three miles of deep snowy roads to find transportation to leave the monastery and the state. He went to Berkeley, found the police station, and according to the news story, walked around the block “a hundred times” before going inside. After much soul-searching, he turned himself in for parole violations. Harris told the police, “I want to get this thing squared away. I’m capable of being good; I know that, but right now I have a very low opinion of myself.” 

I never knew Harris. His brief but poignant encounter with the Utah monks, however, is typical of countless others, some of which I witnessed as a boy when I visited the Abbey. 

The Harris encounter illustrates three things I have loved and admired most about the Utah monks. They welcomed everyone. They did not build their monastery as a place to escape from the problems of the world but as a place to help the world in a unique way. And as they lived in their Abbey walls, they were extremely careful (and charitable) to try not to judge either each other or those of us who remained outside.

The Utah Trappists followed the Rule of St. Benedict, which explains my first point of admiration. Rule 53 says, “All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ, for he himself will say: ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me.’”

Theologian Henri Nouwen, who spent time at the Abbey of the Genesee, a Trappist monastery in upstate New York, and kept a diary about his experiences, explained well my second notion, that of no-escape. He wrote, “If I were to ask about my seven months at the Abbey, ‘Did it work, did I solve my problems?’ the simple answer would be, ‘It did not work, it did not solve my problems.’ And I know that a year, two years, or even a lifetime as a Trappist monk would not have ‘worked’ either. Because a monastery is not built to solve problems but to praise the Lord in the midst of them.” 

Father Brendan Freeman, the last superior at Utah’s Holy Trinity Abbey before it closed 2017, illustrates my final point (avoiding judgment) well in his wonderful book Come and See: The Monastic Way for Today.  Freeman quotes St. Augustine, “Men are strange creatures, the less they focus on their own sins, the more they focus on the sins of others.” He notes how monks resist this temptation of judgment: “The best way to keep from this vice of judging others is to be acutely aware of our own failings and sins. Hold them like a sack in front of our face, not like a sack slung against our back. On our back, we might forget they are there. In front of our eyes, we cannot forget them.”

A second Oakland news article reports that after turning himself in to police in Berkeley, California, Phillip Harris served his time for the parole violation, and got out of prison again about a year later. Instead of joining the Utah monastery, he moved to Newark, New Jersey, and worked in a theatre. Another unknown employee stole funds, and the owners brought in auditors to check the background of all the employees. 

Fearing his criminal history would be exposed and put his job (and perhaps his freedom) at risk, Harris now age 28, took about $4,500 from the theatre and ran. He headed to New York City. He eventually made his way west again, after he ran out of money. In June 1958, perhaps with the words of the Utah monks still echoing in his ears, he made his way to the Berkeley police once more and turned himself in again. He was sent back to Newark to face charges.

I’d like to know the rest of the Phillip Harris story, but do not yet. I am left to hope that he continued during the rest of his life to heed the quite sound advice the Utah Trappist monks gave him earlier, “Pay your debt to society and make yourself square with the world!”

*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.