By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
The Bible is full of beautiful writing, including the poetic image in Isaiah 2:4 about nations beating “swords into plowshares.” As a child of the war-torn twentieth century, I’ve often wondered if this was a mere aspirational phrase. Utah’s old Trappist monastery makes me think otherwise.
The Huntsville monastery—founded 75 years ago this year—was a product of the very wars that bloodied the century of my birth. In The Seven Storey Mountain, Famous Kentucky monk and writer Thomas Merton described his Gethsemani Abbey as bursting at the seams in the late 1940s, filled with men seeking a radical new lifestyle after witnessing the horrors of World War II.
To ease the overcrowding, in July 1947 Kentucky Abbot Frederic Dunne sent three dozen of his monks west to start a new abbey in Northern Utah. They arrived by train in Ogden and drove by bus a half hour east to Huntsville on July 10, 1947. Many of these pioneer monks, and the other brothers who later joined them, were warriors.
My friend Brother Boniface Ptasienski, a lanky New York City native, served the U.S. Army as a Polish and Russian translator in Europe during the climactic years of World War II. Afterwards, he said he felt a strong call to ora et labora—Latin for prayer and work—the Cistercian motto. He joined Gethsemani Abbey still wearing his military uniform, and then spent sixty years in Utah raising chickens and working in the monastery bookstore.
Father Brendan Hanratty—a World War II medic— was a trained optician from Ireland who emigrated to California before the war started. Assigned to the Pacific theatre, he saw fierce battles. According to his hometown archives, he was “so dismayed with the needless loss of life in that particularly bloody conflict that he immediately joined the Trappist Order.” He spent the next six decades baking bread and caring for his fellow monks in the abbey infirmary.
One of the first men to join the new Huntsville abbey was a large, strong, and quiet California Hispanic man. Formerly Carlos Philip Bernard Castro, Brother Benedict came to Utah seeking peace after enduring six months of suffering starvation and other deplorable conditions in a German prisoner of war camp. His parents were Mexican immigrant farmers. Perhaps taking up their legacy, he found solitude driving trucks and tractors and praying in Holy Trinity Abbey’s 1,800 acres.
He was not alone. Father Jerome Siler, another Utah monastery founder and its longtime librarian, served as an English Army chaplain during World War II. Brother Edward Eick served in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1945 and later ran the abbey guesthouse and business operations. Brother Mark Stazinski and Brother Nicholas Prinster both served in the Navy during World War II. Nick became the abbey cattle rancher. Mark was the monastery’s accomplished carpenter and cook.
One Utah monk was a Marine who survived the Battle of Iwo Jima. Other Utah monks were veterans of World War I and the Korean War, or fought in Vietnam. My friend Father Alan Hohl signed up to fly Navy planes in the waning years of World War II, but later said he was so relieved he never had to drop any bombs on people.
These remarkable men did exactly what the Prophet Isaiah demanded. They turned their very real swords into actual plowshares, and they did it at a monastery. How?
Trappist monk Thomas Merton provides some answers. He too knew about war. Merton was born in Europe during World War I. His younger brother John Paul, a sergeant in the Royal Canadian Air Force, died at age 24 in a plane accident during the Second World War. Merton noticed the growing threat of nuclear annihilation even from behind his cloister walls.
During a quarter century in Gethsemani Abbey, and especially in his final years, Merton spent many hours considering and writing about how to end war and violence. I’ll never be able to explain his thinking with his same eloquence, but in true contemplative monk fashion, he looked inward and upward for a solution, instead of outward.
Merton concluded that the root of war is fear, and the antidote to such fear is personal transformation.
In his 1961 book New Seeds of Contemplation, Merton wrote, “The man who is able to hate strongly and with a quiet conscience is one who is complacently blind to all unworthiness in himself and serenely capable of seeing all his own wrongs in someone else.” Merton recommended, “Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed—but hate these things in yourself, not in another.”
In his 1966 essay “Blessed are the Meek: The Christian Roots of Nonviolence,” Merton built on the notion that self-transformation lies at the heart of peacemaking. He believed changing ourselves would in turn change our view of others, empower us “to learn something from the adversary” and try “to see some good in him.” Merton observed, “[T]he dread of being open to the ideas of others generally comes from our hidden insecurity about our own convictions.”
As others have explained, Merton made his peacemaking existential, part of the fabric of his life, just like Jesus and Gandhi did. There are few better tools for making peace existential than a monastery, for it is the sort of place that sands down one’s rough edges and pries open one’s eyes to humanity’s common strengths and weaknesses.
Trappist Father Brendan Freeman, the last superior of the Huntsville monastery, addressed this transforming power of monasteries in his 2010 book Come and See—the Monastic Way for Today. According to Father Brendan, the monk grows by discovering how he is weak, a passionate sinner in need of God’s mercy, and how everyone else is in the same boat, a realization that leads to compassion. “The first step is learning to have compassion for yourself. The second step is learning to have compassion for others.”
On this point, Father Brendan’s book quoted Saint Augustine, “Men are strange creatures, the less they focus on their own sins the more they focus on the sins of others.” Father Brendan explained, “There must be hundreds of Desert Fathers’ sayings that forbid us to judge our brother. The best way to do this is not by making a firm resolution not to so act, as if willpower alone could achieve this. The best way to keep from this vice of judging others harshly 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.”
The Gospel of Matthew (7:3-5) concurs: “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.”
The Utah monks—including the Trappist veterans of so much war and discord—surrendered to a monastery life that transformed them and revealed the logs in their own eyes. As that happened, what might otherwise have been harsh indictments of their fellow men and women dissolved into love, kindness, and hospitality.
Whenever I asked, they’d also gently explain that I could do this too, not as a monk but in the monastery of my heart. As a result, whenever I need or want to be a better person, I visit the old Huntsville monastery grounds, nestled between Ogden Valley’s towering mountains and green pastures.
Although the monastery closed in 2017, I still hear the imprint of decades of monk chant echoing in birdsong and cicada trill.
I stroll amid the crooked white crosses rising up throughout the small and quaint cemetery at Holy Trinity Abbey.
And like I did on a recent Memorial Day weekend, I sit quietly on the lawn and remember the three dozen souls buried there.
They never fail to inspire me to beat my own swords into plowshares.
*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.
