By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
I spent many happy hours as a boy visiting the now-closed Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah. It is impossible to catalogue or pigeonhole the wide swath of men who lived there, but I remember meeting three main types of monks—the good shepherd, the wise teacher, and the simple practitioner. During the three months of our recent COVID-19 shelter-at-home time, I read or reread three books revealing those three lovely prototypes I first noticed so many years ago.
In 2010, Father Brendan Freeman, an abbot or superior at several Cistercian monasteries, published Come and See—the Monastic Way for Today. He is the good shepherd. Before his death in 2020, Father Charles Cummings wrote, published, and updated a book called Monastic Practices. With a master’s degree in formative spirituality, Father Charles is the wise teacher. Brother Paul Quenon, a poet and the author of 2018’s In Praise of the Useless Life—a Monk’s Memoir, is the simple practitioner.
I met Father Brendan while he served as superior of Utah’s Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity during the last few years before it closed in 2017. Chapter 2 of St. Benedict’s rule for monasteries explains how an abbot “must know what a difficult and demanding burden he has undertaken: directing souls and serving a variety of temperaments, coaxing, reproving and encouraging them as appropriate.” Father Brendan was a loving shepherd for a handful of elderly but strong-minded Trappist monks confronting the imminent loss of what had been their beloved home for many decades. I read his book first.
Come and See is a compilation of Father Brendan’s writings and homilies from his years as abbot of New Melleray Abbey in Dubuque, Iowa. The book reveals the many aspects of his character that helped him shepherd the Utah monks. One is his collegial, amiable style. He writes, “St. Benedict did not create monastic life. His generous gift to the church was to make it accessible to the ordinary Christians. His work is like a vine with many clusters of grapes. All kinds of people, monastic and non-monastic, can enjoy his wine. When people live his rule honestly and thoughtfully, they become friends. They do not set out to become friends. That is not the purpose of the rule. However, in the process of living the Gospel, people become friends.” (p. 73)
Father Brendan led with humility as well as friendship. In one of my favorite passages from his book, he first quotes 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 continues, “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.” (pp. 129-130)
I knew Father Charles Cummings from the Huntsville Abbey when I was a boy. (See “‘I’m glad there’s such a thing as monks.’” Remembering Father Charles Cummings OCSO” ). I did not know he wrote a guidebook on monastic practices, however, until many years later. I finally read his book this year, and now I quote from it regularly. Father Charles was a calm and quiet teacher of spirituality, and his insights on the practices of monks can help anyone looking to better develop their own spirit. For example, his words about “accepting one another” jumped off the page at me: “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.” (p. 155)
In my humble opinion, one of Father Charles’s best insights concerns the value of monasteries to the community around them. He wrote, “In our contemporary age of fast-moving, fragmented, driven, overstimulated, pleasure-and-profit seekers, the witness of a stable, peaceful monastic community is likely to attract visitors who find themselves by pausing for a time to share the monastic tranquility and prayerfulness. When they leave, they may carry with them a resolution to live a more God-centered life themselves. In this way, the monastery gradually has a stabilizing influence on the surrounding society, like leaven in the dough that permeates and transform everything that comes into contact with it.” (p. 187)
The one of these three monks I never met is Brother Paul Quenon. Shepherded by people like Father Brendan and taught by people like Father Charles, Brother Paul exemplifies the simple, humble, and daily practice of monasticism. He filled his book, In Praise of the Useless Life, with existential monk stories: adventures matching wits with an enthusiastic mockingbird, fond humorous recollections of various Gethsemani hermitage monks, moments of photographic contemplation, meditation by writing poetry and reading the words of Emily Dickinson, and memories of the good company of his novice master, Thomas Merton. Just what is all this? Brother Paul explains, “We are surrounded with the good things that make life agreeable: good liturgy, good community, good order, plenty of reading and work—all of which are wholesome enough to be holy.” (p. 136)
I especially like Brother Paul’s reflection on the spiritual value of writing: “These reflections and stories about my life are another way of being present to my life intentionally. Not in order to re-live it, but to re-create as a form of celebration. To write is another form of prayer, in fact a rather laborious form, but like liturgy and labor, another way of entering into community with others, now in a haphazard way….It is a way of being in the present holding something, however small, of the whole that has been my life. Life has given me much to delight in, and I pass it on to others.” (p. 132)
At the time I started reading/rereading these three monk books in early 2020, I did not expect them to become my Trappist Trinity of coronavirus companions, but it makes complete sense now, as we slowly emerge from the great pandemic captivity of 2020. It is as my mother always said, repeating a line from her favorite movie, The Sound of Music: “When God closes a door, he always opens a window.”
*Mike O’Brien 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, will be published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.
