By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
A few weeks ago, my friend Joel Campbell, a BYU journalism professor, asked me to give a talk about how the Utah Trappist monks from Huntsville interacted with non-Catholics. The speech was for the Salt Lake Interfaith Roundtable. Joel’s request forced me to consider the very essence of what he and I call the monks’ “interfaith ideal.”
I grew up at the Abbey of the Holy Trinity in Northern Utah after a painful family divorce in the 1970s. When the Huntsville monastery closed four decades later, I wrote a memoir called Monastery Mornings to help the world remember my friends the monks.
Just because I jotted down my own memories of the monks—who were my fellow Catholics—does not mean that I had the right words to describe their interfaith orientation. And so, I looked for inspiration and guidance on this point from the words of the monks themselves.
I did not have to look far. The monks’ spoken and written words during their 75 years in Utah reveal five basic attitudes that I believe made them open to inter-religious friendship.
First, the Utah monks practiced and perfected a constant kindness. Brother Nicholas Prinster, the tough and quiet cattle monk who also was an eloquent philosopher, is a good example. In a eulogy for a family member, he wrote, “There are only two profound tragedies in any life—not to love and not to tell those we love that we love them.”
Brother Nick also explained, “None of us can deny that in each of our lives, there is suffering, pain and sorrow, and death. It is these difficulties and trials that make it all the more necessary that we always be watchful that we see the beauty of creation, the beauty of life, the beauty of loving.”
Second, the monks had compassion for other people. Again, a Brother Nick eulogy is illustrative, “It’s not a simple thing to be a human being. We all have many persons inside of us. Who is the real person? They all are.” The compassionate monk further noted, “We are all of us broken. We live by mending, and the glue that we are mended with is the grace of God, and what is the grace of God but love?”
Third, although they were devout Catholics, the Utah monks had a universal and nondenominational view of the divine. Their last abbot, Father David Altman, once wrote: “The bottom line in a person’s relationship with God is not his formal religion. It is love, because God is love. God is not Catholic or Protestant. God is good will.”
And the bookstore monk—Father Patrick Boyle—who over the years probably met most of the visitors to the abbey, told all of them, “When you walked through that door, Christ came into this room!” He never quizzed them about their creed or lack of faith before he said it either. He just saw God in everyone he met.
Fourth, the Utah monks believed in acceptance. Another longtime Utah monk, Father Charles Cummings, wrote a book called Monastic Practices, explaining in plain English what the monks did and why. One thing they did (and that he wrote about) is accept people as they are.
I love Father Charles’ definition of that word: “Acceptance does not mean accepting behavior that is harmful to the common good, but it does mean that I stop trying to change or refashion everybody so they live as I would prefer them to live.”
Finally, the monks were careful not to judge others. The last leader of the Utah abbey, Father Brendan Freeman, also wrote a book about monastic life. Based on his time as the leader of New Melleray Abbey in Iowa, Father Brendan called his book Come and See—the Monastic Way for Today.
In one section of his book, after quoting 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 Utah monks were in good philosophical company with such thinking. Pope Francis called another member of their Cistercian order, famous Kentucky Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton, “a man of dialogue, a promoter of peace between peoples and religions” in his September 2015 speech to Congress.
I once read an article suggesting that inter-religious dialogue was the final phase of Merton’s long and evolving spirituality. Merton certainly did not shy away from the subject. In fact, it is at the heart of one of the best known moments of his life.
In his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Merton described his March 1958 epiphany on the streets of downtown Louisville: “[I]n the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.”
Five years later, in November 1963, Merton explained further, “Whatever I may have written, I think all can be reduced in the end to this one truth, that God calls human persons to union with Himself and with one another in Christ.”
The words of the Utah monks and their Kentucky brother Thomas Merton certainly explain why they would be open to inter-religious dialogue and understanding, but actions speak louder than words.
Did the Utah monks just talk the talk, or did they walk the walk too when it came to their interfaith ideal? I don’t need to research the monks’ words to answer that question. My own memories can do that.
(See next week’s post for Walking the Walk: The Interfaith Ideal of the Utah Trappist Monks.)
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
