The Mother of Monastery Mornings

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

Most people understand my new book Monastery Mornings (Paraclete Press 2021) as a story about men, specifically Trappist monks and me. They are right. From time to time, however, some readers tell me they also noticed and appreciated a parallel story, one about a woman—my mother. They are right too.

Publisher Paraclete Press quite accurately describes my book as follows: “This warmhearted memoir describes how a small, insecure boy with a vibrant imagination found an unlikely family in the company of monks at Holy Trinity Abbey, in the mountains of rural Latter-day Saint Utah. Struggling with his parents’ recent divorce, Michael O’Brien discovered a community filled with warmth, humor, idiosyncrasies, and most of all, listening ears. Filled with anecdotes and delightful ‘behind the scenes’ descriptions of his experiences living alongside the monks as they farmed, prayed, buried their dead, ate, and shared the joys of life, Monastery Mornings speaks to the value of spiritual fatherhood, the lasting impact of positive mentoring, and the stability that the spiritual life can offer to people of all ages and walks of life.” 

Of course, anyone who reads the book also knows these things happened only because my mother brought me to the monastery to meet the monks, and then brought me back several more times each week over the next ten years. The book is as much about her life during that monastic decade as it is about mine. She is the mother of the monastery mornings.

Mom was Kathleen Mavourneen (“Kay”) Gleason O’Brien. She grew up in a hardworking, blue-collar Irish-Catholic family in Burlington, Vermont. Mom was the second in an unfortunate line of motherless mothers. Her own mother, Catherine Helen Sullivan Gleason died in 1939 when Mom was just a young girl. Similarly, Mom’s grandmother, Kate Leonard Sullivan from Limerick, Ireland, died in 1892 while giving birth to Catherine.

Soon after her mother Catherine passed, Mom lost her father Henry Gleason too. His wife Catherine was the backbone of the family, and her death crushed him. He turned to alcohol for self-medication, a common Irish pain prescription. To make matters worse, all this occurred during the Great Depression. Within a short time, he was out of work and bankrupt. A few years later, Henry Gleason disappeared altogether. Mom told us she never knew what became of him. This mystery haunted her.

Despite so much loss at such a young age, there was other family who cared for Mom. Two were in the religious life. Her great uncle Thomas J. Leonard was a local Catholic priest who worked in nearby Middlebury, Vermont. He chose her unusual middle name Mavourneen—which means “my darling”—and sang Irish songs to her. When she was orphaned in the early 1940s, Father Leonard helped place Mom in Burlington’s Mount St. Mary’s boarding school, operated by the Sisters of Mercy.

Mom’s great aunt Mary Gleason was a nun at that convent school, and watched over her, as did several other Sisters of Mercy surrogate mothers. Despite many moments of mischief described in my book, Mom thrived at Mount St. Mary’s until she was able to go live with her older sister Mary K. Winslow.

At about the same time the Utah monastery was starting up in July 1947, my mother met my father Kevin Peter O’Brien at Cathedral High School. They felt in love and got married in 1951 at St. Patrick’s chapel in Burlington’s classic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. Ten years later they had four kids, the youngest one being me.

Mom was doing what she always wanted to do—be a mother and homemaker. Like so many beloved things in her life, however, it did not last.

My father’s career was in the Air Force. There were long periods of separation, moves every couple of years, very few roots, and even less money. The resulting strains—and my father’s apparent infidelity—evaporated the love with which the marriage had started. They divorced in 1970 (see: The Golden Divorce Anniversary).

Thereafter, my father was mostly absent from my life. Mom tried to use her high school education to eke out a living that would support herself and four children. It was a dreadful time for our family, but it also brought us to the monastery.

I always enjoy telling the story of our first visit there, which happened fifty years ago this year. Back then gas cost about 25¢ a gallon. (If only that was true again today!) Mom liked to take long rides in our car. It was an inexpensive form of recreation in Utah’s spectacular scenery.

One day, during such a ride, we were near Huntsville in Northern Utah’s Ogden Valley. We saw and followed a couple of green and white signs with directional arrows that said “MONASTERY,” and ended up at the gates of Holy Trinity Abbey. We drove up the beautiful tree-lined road and suddenly the iconic Quonset hut buildings appeared.

Here is the rest of that first visit story as told in Monastery Mornings: “The bookstore was open and quite busy. One of the store attendants was a tall, thin, and lanky monk. He wore the usual Trappist garb, which is a white robe with a black overlay scapular (apron) with a hood that covered his shoulders and his torso but not his arms. His face was time-weathered and partially paralyzed on one side. He wore a military-style haircut and looked serious, but not in a frightening or unfriendly way. We would learn that his name was Brother Felix McHale. I think Mom was looking for a particular book that day, so she turned to Brother Felix and started to ask, ‘Do you know what I am looking for…?’ Before she finished her thought, he politely interrupted and said, ‘Yes, I do know, you are looking for the same thing as the rest of us—peace.’”

To steal a line from Casablanca, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

I think we visited the monastery so often afterwards because Mom worried that the divorce and related problems would negatively affect her children’s lives. Mom tried to recreate for me, in the middle of my troubled childhood, the positive experiences with Catholic priests and nuns that had sustained her throughout her own youth. She thought I needed some good role models, and she was right.

This is not, however, the full story. Just like Brother Felix predicted during our first visit to the abbey bookstore, Mom found peace at the Huntsville monastery too.

If you think a young boy like me was out of place at a Trappist monastery in the 1970s, can you imagine how a 40-year old divorced woman felt, and how she might have been perceived? Yet, the monks accepted her, without judgment, as someone trying to work things out, as a fellow seeker of solitude and truth.

The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung once wrote that the Assumption of Mary the Mother of Jesus—Mary going to Heaven, body intact without suffering decay after death—brought a certain feminine balance to the otherwise “male” Holy Trinity. The Huntsville monastery, named Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity, was dedicated to that Trinity but also to the woman who helped balance it out. So while the monks were my friends, they were not afraid to be Mom’s friends too, and she needed them just as much as I did.

They offered support and kindness the rest of her life. For instance, when she faced the empty nest, Brother Boniface wrote to her: “Kay, my sister, as children leave home, mother remains. In silence, solitude before God, prayers, tears, joys, memories, petition, love, hope ascend daily heavenward. In fact, also for the many children in our good world who have no one to pray for them.”

It is true that Monastery Mornings is a book about a boy who “found an unlikely family in the company of monks.” It also is a book, however, about the loving woman who guided him and her there and who, despite her own great distress, heroically steered them both through the troubled waters of the divorce neither wanted.

Thanks Mom. Happy Mother’s Day. I love you.

*Mike O’Brien (author website here) 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, was published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.