Twain, Trappists, Tom Sawyer, and me

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

Some of my favorite childhood recollections involve monks and Mark Twain. That’s an odd juxtaposition, but likely due to the Tom-Sawyer-like boyhood adventures I enjoyed a half century ago at an old Trappist monastery near my home.

After a difficult family divorce in the 1970s, I basically grew up at the now-closed Holy Trinity Abbey in Huntsville in rural Northern Utah. I tell that story—including my mischief among the monks—in my 2021 book Monastery Mornings.

At about the same time I started visiting the monastery, I also discovered Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The great American humorist first published his classic novel about boyhood 150 years ago in 1876.

It’s interesting and ironic that I found both at the same time. Both Twain and Tom had complicated relationships with religion.

Twain grew up Presbyterian in the Antebellum South, where his family owned slaves. Twain evolved into an abolitionist, but in 1905 he also wrote to a friend that going to church gave him dysentery. 

The English and American Studies scholar (and Latter-day Saint apostle) Jeffrey R. Holland once wrote that Twain “could not live with traditional American Protestantism.” Holland added, however, that Twain “could not live without feelings of innate religious hunger either.” 

In a 1977 talk at BYU, Holland said that Twain’s time in the Old American West gave him “the only real religious stance that would appeal to him for any length of time. Like his river experience, it was unorthodox, informal, free-wheeling, unfettered.”

Tom Sawyer liked unorthodox, informal, free-wheeling, and unfettered too, and much of his mischief plays out in and at church. For example, Twain’s young hero squirms and moans in discomfort when forced to put on his stiff and confining Sunday best clothes.

Tom wins a prized Bible, but only by trading his boyhood treasures for the tickets needed to claim the award. Tom also sits away from church windows to avoid distractions, but ends up more interested in a beetle than in a long and harsh sermon that Twain says “thinned the predestined elect down to a company so small as to be hardly worth the saving.”

Of course, the best church scene in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer happens when everyone thinks Tom and other boys have drowned but the boys are listening to their own funeral: “There was a rustle in the gallery, which nobody noticed; a moment later the church door creaked; the minister raised his streaming eyes above his handkerchief, and stood transfixed! First one and then another pair of eyes followed the minister’s, and then almost with one impulse the congregation rose and stared while the three dead boys came marching up the aisle…They had been hid in the unused gallery listening to their own funeral sermon! Aunt Polly, Mary, and the Harpers threw themselves upon their restored ones, smothered them with kisses and poured out thanksgivings…”

That’s a whole lot of unorthodox, informal, free-wheeling, and unfettered. Twain explains that Tom finds “more satisfaction” in the “divine service” when there is “a bit of variety in it.” Fair point.

My Monastery Mornings story—about a boy raised by monks—is unorthodox, informal, free-wheeling, and unfettered too. But what would Tom Sawyer or Twain have thought of monks and monasteries?

In the novel that bears his name, Tom knows and talks about hermits, but clearly prefers a pirate’s life. To my knowledge, that’s about as close as Twain lets Tom get to a monastery. 

Although there were two Trappist monasteries operating in the United States while Twain was alive—Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky and New Melleray Abbey on the Mississippi River in Iowa—there’s no indication Twain visited either one. 

Twain did encounter (and liked) monks and monasteries when he went to Europe while researching and writing his famous 1869 travel journal The Innocents Abroad. For example, Twain wrote how a “good-natured” friar gave him a tour of a Capuchin monastery’s bizarre catacombs in Rome. 

And Twain was proud of how he mastered the code/meaning of monks he saw pictured in European art: “We have mastered some things, possibly of trifling import in the eyes of the learned, but to us they give pleasure….When we see a monk going about with a lion and looking tranquilly up to heaven, we know that that is St. Mark. When we see a monk with a book and a pen, looking tranquilly up to heaven, trying to think of a word, we know that that is St. Matthew. When we see a monk sitting on a rock, looking tranquilly up to heaven, with a human skull beside him, and without other baggage, we know that that is St. Jerome.”

Twain also once said that his favorite of his many works was his 1896 book about the Catholic saint, Joan of Arc. He explained: “When we reflect that [Joan’s] century was the brutalest, the wickedest, the rottenest in history since the darkest ages, we are lost in wonder at the miracle of such a product from such a soil. The contrast between her and her century is the contrast between day and night. She was truthful when lying was the common speech of men; she was honest when honesty was become a lost virtue; she was a keeper of promises when the keeping of a promise was expected of no one; she gave her great mind to great thoughts and great purposes when other great minds wasted themselves upon pretty fancies or upon poor ambitions; she was modest, and fine, and delicate when to be loud and coarse might be said to be universal; she was full of pity when a merciless cruelty was the rule; she was steadfast when stability was unknown, and honorable in an age which had forgotten what honor was; she was a rock of convictions in a time when men believed in nothing and scoffed at all things; she was unfailingly true to an age that was false to the core; she maintained her personal dignity unimpaired in an age of fawnings and servilities; she was of a dauntless courage when hope and courage had perished in the hearts of her nation; she was spotlessly pure in mind and body when society in the highest places was foul in both—she was all these things in an age when crime was the common business of lords and princes, and when the highest personages in Christendom were able to astonish even that infamous era and make it stand aghast at the spectacle of their atrocious lives black with unimaginable treacheries, butcheries, and beastialities.”

Accordingly, based on all this evidence (albeit mixed), as well as their love of adventure, I think both Twain and Tom Sawyer would have been drawn to the old Utah monastery for the same reasons as me. It was an interesting place with unique opportunities for both exploration and mischief.

During my boyhood days there in the 1970s, the monks were not really used to having a little kid around, but they also did not seem to mind too much. If they were surrogate fathers to me, perhaps I was a surrogate son to some really good and kind men who knew they’d never have one of their own.

When we’d arrive at the abbey, my mother and sister would typically go into the church to pray, but I’d start to explore the farm or the abbey cemetery. Although the Trappists sometimes reminded me about the boundaries between them and the public, often a monk would aid or abet me in these adventures.

And so it was that I learned how to drive a tractor and how to operate a bookstore cash register. I learned how creamed honey and fresh whole wheat bread were made. (And I got to sample lots of both!)

Two of the best spots at the monastery were the dairy’s nursery barn—especially if baby cows were there—and the chicken coop. Cows and chickens played major roles in two of my favorite stories about my Holy Trinity Abbey mischief.

One day after Sunday Mass, the monks sent me out in a field—dressed in my church clothes—to retrieve a stray calf. It was comical cowboying at best. Monastery Mornings includes this description of my unorthodox cattle ranching techniques:

“I circled around again, walked up to it, and once more directed it, this time more forcefully and more loudly, but with the same result. This emerging pattern repeated itself several times. After about fifteen minutes or so of this pathetic excuse for herding, the calf was about fifty to a hundred yards farther away from the place where the monks wanted it to be than when we started. I began to wish I had more closely watched the calf ropers at the rodeo. Alas, I had no roping skills, and, more critically, no rope. I am not even sure what I would have done with the crazy calf had I been able to rope it. The calf outweighed me, had home-field advantage, and if roped likely would have dragged me around the pasture at will.”

Unfortunately, I did not fare much better with the chickens: “I liked to walk around the massive coop and pretend I was talking with the chickens. I never meant to frighten them, but sometimes if I got too close to the cages, wings would flap and feathers would fly. [In contrast Brother Boniface] lovingly tended to his chickens. He would often make indecipherable comforting and reassuring cooing or humming sounds, almost as if he was singing to them. Unlike my own more guttural sounds, the hens recognized his voice and calmed as he walked by. It reminded me of the story I once heard in school about how St. Francis preached to the birds….Brother Bon did the same thing with his thousands of clucking chickens.”

It probably was not mere coincidence that I started reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer at about the same time that I started going to the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville. 

It was not just an interesting novel, it was a bit of an instruction manual too.

(Photo: Mike and Mark at the National Mississippi River Museum & Aquarium in Dubuque, Iowa.)

*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. Mike’s new holiday novel, tentatively titled “The Merry Matchmaker Monks,” will be published in time for Christmas 2026.