By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
As I was helping find new homes for the last few items from the former Trappist monastery library in Huntsville, Utah, the strangest thing occurred. About a half dozen of the monks’ old books called out to me, asking that I read them. I now have a very unusual reading list that my monk friends, most departed for many years, bequeathed to me without even knowing it.
The oldest book is a centenarian, called The Irish Nuns at Ypres- An episode of the war, written by members of the Benedictine community in Belgium (and edited by Richard Barry O’Brien, an Irish lawyer, historian, and journalist). The book is a firsthand account of the WWI German invasion of the Belgian town of Ypres and the Irish sisters’ convent located there. As battles raged about them, the sisters faced the stark choice to either stay and fulfill their religious and charitable mission or flee from the horrors of a war zone.
Almost as old is the monastery’s 1920 copy of Sabine Baring-Gould’s Early Reminiscences 1834-1864. Baring-Gould was a nineteenth century Anglican priest, novelist, and scholar, also known for writing the hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers.” His book’s preface notes, “There is a lesson I think, in all humility, I may say that my life may teach, at all events to some. And that is to start out in Life with a purpose.”
Another of the books, published in 1920 and also almost a century old, is a selection of the “Parochial and Plain” sermons of John Henry Newman. Newman was an Anglican cleric and later a Catholic priest, cardinal, theologian, and poet. Pope Francis will canonize him as a saint in October 2019. Newman also wrote the popular hymn “Lead, Kindly Light.”
Apparently in an effort to keep the Catholic/Anglican relationship in balance, the Utah abbey’s library included books about both Thomas More (St. Thomas More by E.E. Reynolds, 1954) and his political and religious nemesis Thomas Cromwell (Theodore Maynard’s The Crown and the Cross, 1950). I suspect there will be some potential conflict as each book beckons me to read it before the other.
My monk book reading list is not limited to topics on theology or church history. One item is a 1966 first edition of Paul Fay’s The Pleasure of his Company. Fay penned the book as a tribute to his longtime friend John F. Kennedy. Fay was an usher at JFK’s wedding and served on his political staffs. One of the monks cut and pasted news articles to the front of the book, describing how JFK’s family was not pleased with certain passages.
Perfect for a monastery in the old west, my new reading list also includes the 1929 novel Cimarron, written by Pulitzer Prize winning author Edna Ferber. Cimarron tells stories of persons caught up in the Oklahoma land rushes of the late 1800s. It was adapted into a 1931 RKO film starring Irene Dunne and Richard Dix, both of whom were nominated for Oscars for their roles. A 1961 remake also was nominated for two Oscars.
It is an eclectic reading list, to say the least, and there is a reasonable possibility that the books about JFK and the Ypres Irish nuns will more easily hold my attention than Rev. Baring-Gould’s memoir, but we shall see. Each book takes us on a unique journey, and the written word is a work of creative art for both the writer and the reader.
Thomas Merton, himself a great Trappist monk and writer of books, once said, “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. The mind that responds to the intellectual and spiritual values that lie hidden in a poem, a painting, or a piece of music, discovers a spiritual vitality that lifts it above itself, takes it out of itself, and makes it present to itself on a level of being that it did not know it could ever achieve.” (No Man Is an Island, 1955)
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is writing a book about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah.
