The Nick of Time

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

Good Saint Nicholas, whose feast day we celebrated on December 6, probably is known as the greatest gift giver of all time. His little known Utah namesake, however, a kind and humble Trappist monk from Huntsville, may be the greatest giver of time itself.

Clarence Edward Prinster was born in 1927 in the middle of a large Catholic clan from Grand Junction, Colorado. His family owned and operated grocery stores. In 1949, after a stint in the Navy and a few years of pre-med studies, he decided not to be a doctor and to forego the family business. Instead, he joined a new Trappist monastery just built in rural Huntsville, Utah. He took the religious name “Brother Nicholas,” but everyone knew him as Brother Nick.

Although Brother Nick liked to say that if anyone ever wrote a book about him they’d call it The Unlikely Monk, he took to monastic life quite well. For many years, he managed the monastery’s extensive cattle and farm operations. Although living a contemplative life, he was a very busy, tough, and hard-working man (see: Another Nicholas and some different deer.)

This rugged rancher, however, also had a keen and subtle eye for beauty. He once said, “The beautiful is what makes life’s journey not just of heartaches and pain, but of hope, of love” and a journey where “our sadness is turned to joy.”

In that spirit, in the old days before tractors, he rode behind the horse-pulled machine that cut the monastery’s primary crop. The horses were so well trained that they turned on their own at the end of each row in the field. Brother Nick would just sit back, enjoy the beautiful pastoral setting, and smell the fresh cut grass as he and the horses floated through the gently waving alfalfa.

His older sister Josephine Prinster DeOiner visited the monastery often and recognized her sibling’s aesthetic vision. Noting his love of—and talent for—working with wood, when she saw him looking at clock kits in a craft magazine, she suggested he start making them and bought him a kit.

It was an inspired idea. Brother Nick went to work creating unique timepieces with the same energy he devoted to herding cattle. He gifted that first completed grandmother clock back to his sister Josephine. A younger sister, Lucille Prinster Haggerty, helped fund the purchase of power tools for his new shop, and as a result Brother Nick built many more clocks during the rest of his long and productive life.

One such grandfather clock stood just outside the monastic library main door. The other monks relied on it, to know when to signal the rest of the community that it was almost time for the church services central to their common monastery life…Mass, praying the Psalms, and chanting the Liturgy of the Hours.

Only two other items were allowed in those austere undecorated cloister hallways. One was the Stations of the Cross. The other was a statue of Jesus, presented by Mother Teresa of Calcutta when she visited her friend Brother Nick and the other monks in October 1972. (Mother Teresa let the statue ride in her upgraded first class airplane seat while she sat in coach with everyone else.) (See: Mother’s Teresa’s Utah Visit.)

Over time, and with the help and encouragement of his neighbor and friend Wayne Kenley, Brother Nick moved away from pre-packaged kits and started cutting and designing his own clocks. Wayne, a skilled carpenter and glazier, helped with the glass settings.

Eventually, the Trappist monk made at least one clock for each Prinster sibling, and then some for his many nieces and nephews and their families too. It was his way to avoid what he called the “only two profound tragedies in any life—not to love and not to tell those we love that we love them.”

Like his fellow Trappists (see: Sustainable Brother Stanislaus), Brother Nick was quite resourceful in obtaining wood. One clock he gave his nephew and several others was made from the floor of an old railroad box car. The car was donated by a friend for the monk to use for storage at a cattle feedlot. Brother Nick discovered the floor wood was black walnut—his favorite—and so he repurposed it into something much more special. 

Brother Nick’s nephew returned the favor after working in Africa for Catholic Relief Services. He salvaged the beautiful hard redwood from a packing crate used to send home his personal effects and passed it on to Huntsville for his woodworking uncle to use in his many other projects.

The monastic clockmaker lived in Trappist vows for almost 70 years. Over the course of seven decades, he ran out of family members to whom he could give the gift of time. Thus, he started crafting and giving that gift to friends and neighbors too, both in the Ogden Valley and elsewhere. Each clock included a small brass plaque with at least this inscription: “Made by Brother Nicholas Holy Trinity Abbey.” He even made a few “Happy Hour” clocks that said “Happy Hour starts at five” and all the numbers were 5s.

The monk’s close friend Marsha Kenley estimates that there are 70-80 Nick clocks keeping time all over the country. His niece Lisa Tuthill thinks there are more, and notes, “I would always tell my children that if the house was burning, they had to save themselves, because I was going to save the clock.” I would be a wealthy man if I had just a dollar for every time someone has told me, during the last three years alone, that a “Brother Nick clock” is their most precious family heirloom.

Almost always, this is true not due just to the clock’s beauty, but also because of the beautiful time the owner spent with its builder. I knew the Utah monastery and its monks for many years, and yet I was clueless about this profound and generous legacy. I did not know Brother Nick as well as I knew other Trappists. As a boy, I worked in the abbey book store and chicken coop, but was too young and too scrawny to be much of a rancher. 

The Brother Nick I did know was a big, strong, quiet, hat-wearing, cattle-wrangling cowboy. I never dreamed he was an artisan too, but Brother Nick had no trouble whatsoever balancing such diverse activities. He once wrote, “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.”

I first learned that Brother Nick built beautiful clocks when I saw a lovely black and white photo (taken by writer Cassidy Hall) of him doing so. On my last visit to the monastery before it closed in 2017, I bought one of the last clocks he made (see: The Bells of Brother Nicholas).

As the years caught up with him (and me), I got to know Brother Nick—just a little bit—at his assisted living facility in Salt Lake City. By then, he used a wheelchair to get around most of the time. After one spring 2018 meeting of the retired Utah monks that I attended too, he asked me to help him back to his room. I readily agreed.

I pushed his wheelchair forward into the warm sunshine. He was quiet and serene, and stopped our journey but once, so he could appreciate a blooming rose bush for just a few moments. “Such pretty flowers,” he mused, while my heart sang.

When we arrived at his small room, he smiled, looked up, and said, “Please come see me again.” I agreed, but I guess Heaven wanted to see him even more. He passed away a few weeks later on June 18, 2018, before I could get back there.

Whenever I remember those last precious moments I shared with that lovely soul whom I was just getting to know, a few more of his written words fill my thoughts: “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?”

Brother Nick became a monk for many reasons. One was the influence of a Léon Bloy book he read in 1947. In Pilgrim of the Absolute, the French Catholic author Bloy wrote, “Every man who begets a free act projects his personality into the infinite….it cures the sick, consoles those in despair, calms storms, ransoms prisoners, converts the infidel and protects mankind.”

It keeps pretty good time too.

(Note: I appreciate the help from Don Morrissey, Cassidy Hall, Marsha Kenley, Tony Prinster, Lisa Tuthill, Ann Griffin, and many other Prinster family members in writing this reflection. The Intermountain Catholic also published this article about Brother Nick’s clocks on December 4, 2020.)

*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 and chosen by the League of Utah Writers as the best non-fiction book of 2022.