By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
As yet another new year begins, I’m stuck ruminating on a simple truth recognized by philosophy, science, and religion alike—nothing lasts forever.
A Greek philosopher once said, “You can’t step into the same river twice.” The Second Law of Thermodynamics concurs, explaining that entropy (disorder) tends to increase in a closed system.
One of the three Buddhist marks of existence is impermanence. The New Testament Book of James (4:14) agrees, “What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.”
Honestly, I kinda hate it. And 2025 won’t help.
The anniversary that never was.
This was supposed to be the year when the law firm where I worked for almost four decades—Jones Waldo Holbrook & McDonough—celebrated its 150th anniversary as a landmark Utah institution.
Instead, the firm no longer exists.
Utah founding father/lawyer Joseph Rawlins started the firm in 1875, about the same time Wyatt Earp began his career as a lawman and just before Custer’s last stand at the Little Bighorn.
Rawlins’ parents had followed Brigham Young west in 1849. Rawlins drifted away from the church of his pioneer family, and tended to represent interests outside the local power structure.
Still, one of his first employees was a young Latter-day Saint with excellent penmanship hired to hand-write legal documents. In 1918, that same man—Heber J. Grant—was called to serve as President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
In 1892, Rawlins served as Utah’s territorial delegate to Congress. He introduced the Enabling Act that provided for Utah’s admission into the Union.
After Utah achieved statehood in 1896, Rawlins was elected by the Utah State Legislature to the United States Senate. When he died almost a century ago in May 1926, The Salt Lake Tribune eulogized Rawlins: “Another giant has fallen in the front rank of Utah’s Old Guard.”
From 1985 to 2022, I practiced law at the firm Rawlins started, a place where we worked/played hard, and tried to earn money but also improve our community. I made lots of good friends there.
I’d planned to retire from Jones Waldo, but that unpleasant universal truth that nothing lasts forever had other ideas. We closed the firm two years ago for a variety of reasons I am still sorting out in my heart and my head.
It was an orderly scuttling of a grand old ship. Most of us, including many staff members, joined another legacy Utah firm named Parsons Behle & Latimer.
The monastery that closed too.
The passage was very difficult. As I navigated it, however, I realized my friends the Utah Trappist monks had much to teach me because they’d survived a similar journey.
Beginning in the 1970s, after a family divorce, I basically grew up at the Huntsville monastery with the monks as surrogate fathers. I tell this story in my book, Monastery Mornings (Paraclete Press 2021).
The Utah monastery—founded in July 1947—closed in 2017 due to a variety of changing forces in the monastic world. A dozen or so remaining monks had to go somewhere else.
Some joined other abbeys, but most moved together to live in a Salt Lake City retirement community that could help meet their geriatric and medical needs. From watching these old monks, I learned five important lessons about facing change.
Lesson One: Find happiness where you are.
Utah Trappist monk Father Alan Hohl—a former Navy aviator—cherished the Huntsville abbey he helped build and where he spent over two-thirds of his long life. He was terribly sad when it all ended, and the monastery closed.
Yet, instead of wallowing in his despair, he raved about the small retirement home apartment where he lived out his final five years. He even called it “a palace.”
He converted one bedroom into a chapel where he could say mass each day. He loved watching the World Series, and one day he pointed to his refrigerator and told me, “It always has a beer in it!”
The old monk found happiness where he was, instead of despairing about where his happiness once had been.
Lesson Two: Heal pain with love.
Shortly after the Trappists arrived in Utah, Brother Nicholas Prinster left his boyhood home in Grand Junction, Colorado. He opted out of medical school, disclaimed his rights to the successful family business, and joined the new monastery.
For the next seven decades, the tall, strong, silent man herded cattle in Huntsville, ran the abbey farm, and built beautiful wooden clocks for his family, friends, and neighbors. His heart was broken when his lovely monastery closed.
Although he struggled with the painful decision, he accepted it…quietly. The last time I saw him at the Salt Lake City retirement home, he was smiling and placidly pointing out the beautiful flowers growing along the path where I was pushing his wheelchair.
How did he navigate the change? He explained in a eulogy for a family member, “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?”
Lesson Three: Live in the moment.
Father Patrick Boyle from St. Louis arrived at the Huntsville abbey in 1950, right after watching Stan Musial hit a home run for his beloved Cardinals. Once at the Utah monastery, he rarely left.
Despite staying put, he met (and blessed) hundreds of visitors each year in the abbey bookstore. He was the last monk to leave the premises when the abbey closed in 2017.
After the move, I asked Father Patrick how he felt about leaving the only home he had known for 67 years. I still was mourning the loss of the monastery, so his answer surprised me.
He called it “a piece of cake.” He explained, “The past is the past, and God will take care of the future, so my job is to live in the present moment.”
Lesson Four: Be with brothers and sisters.
Like all the other Utah monks, when the Huntsville abbey closed, Father Patrick had the chance to move to another Trappist monastery. At age 89, he visited and considered the lovely Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, the home of Thomas Merton.
Merton once described the fields, sun, mud, clay, and wind surrounding the Kentucky monastery as the monks’ “spiritual directors and our novice-masters.” Yet, Father Patrick chose to relocate to the retirement home in Salt Lake City with the other Utah monks.
Trappists take a vow of stability, described this way: “By our vow of stability, we promise to commit ourselves for life to one community of brothers or sisters with whom we will work out our salvation in faith, hope, and love…[we] entrust ourselves to God’s mercy experienced in the company of brothers or sisters who know us and accept us as we are.”
When I asked Father Patrick why he chose to live in two small rooms in a Salt Lake City retirement home instead of at the beautiful abbey in the rolling hills of Central Kentucky, he said, “My vow of stability is not just to a place, it also is to my brothers.”
In other words, life is a constant process of finding and rebuilding community, over and over again.
Lesson Five: One bite at a time.
Father David Altman was the last abbot (leader) at the Utah Trappist monastery. Before joining the abbey, he enjoyed a good life living and working as an accountant in the warm Southern California sunshine.
He gave it all up to become a monk, but it was not easy. He has explained, “Monastic religious life is much like a marriage, where the primary focus is on efforts to make relationships work, and this is challenging work.”
A newspaper reporter once asked him how he did it. He said, “Like a flea eats an elephant…one bite at a time.”
He’s used the same basic technique—with his typical grace and dignity—for the last eight years during his time of great personal change. And now, he’s the last Utah monk standing.
Applying the monks’ lessons at a new law firm.
My new law firm Parsons Behle also has deep roots in Utah and the Old American West. In 1882, shortly after the shootout at Tombstone’s OK Corral and as Annie Oakley made her first appearance at a Wild West show, founder William Dickson relocated his law practice to Salt Lake City.
President Chester A. Arthur appointed Dickson the United States Attorney for the Utah Territory in 1884. He held that job for three tumultuous years while he was both respected and vilified for enforcing the controversial laws against plural marriage.
Yet, Dickson’s skills as a lawyer were undeniable, and later even the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints hired him to assist in some of its legal matters. Commonly known as Judge Dickson, he died in Los Angeles on January 18, 1924.
After he passed, The Salt Lake Tribune described him as a “picturesque and heroic figure of the early west.” The newspaper also said Dickson “was never known to refuse aid, often to the limit, to anyone who came to him for assistance. He was kindly, considerate, and just.”
It turns out that the founders of my two law firms—Joseph Rawlins and William Dickson—knew each other quite well. They were contemporaries, part of a small cohort of lawyers in pre-statehood Utah.
They served on bar committees together, invested in joint business ventures, acted as co-counsel, spoke at the same political rallies, and faced off in the courtroom. They even might have been friends.
Today, Parsons Behle is a place where we work/play hard, and try to earn money but also improve our community. I am making new friends there.
Every goodbye includes the possibility of a hello.
A law firm, of course, is not a monastery. Some might even apply the appellations of heaven and hell to contrast them, but to do so probably elevates clever prose above actual reality.
Despite their differences, both are communities where people commit substantial time, energy, pride, devotion, and even love towards a common goal. Like monasteries, law firms rise or fall depending on the strengths of the relationships within.
After watching the Utah Trappist monks adapt to significant and difficult changes, I think I’ve stumbled upon a viable game plan for living with my own big changes.
Like Father Alan, each day I try to find happiness where I am.
Like Brother Nicholas, despite feeling broken by difficulties, I look for the love and beauty that soothes the pain.
Like Father Patrick, I strive to build new community. As I do, I seek to live in the moment, trying not to worry too much about what may or may not happen in the future.
And like Father David and the flea that ate the elephant, I take on these important and daunting tasks one bite at a time.
I really can’t articulate the deep sadness I still feel knowing my beloved Jones Waldo will never get to celebrate its 150th anniversary in 2025. But, with the help of the Utah monks, I can say I actually look forward to enjoying the 150th anniversary of Parsons Behle in 2032.
Yes, nothing lasts forever, and I probably always will hate that. Thankfully, however, within every goodbye is the possibility of a hello.
(The Salt Lake Tribune published a version of this story on January 5, 2024.)
(Photo: Most of the Utah monks in about 2017 before they closed their Huntsville monastery. Left to right: Father Alan Hohl, Father Patrick Boyle, Father Malachy Flaherty, Father Brendan Freeman, Brother David McManus, Father David Altman, and Brother Nicholas Prinster. From the monastery archives.)
*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.
