‘Silent, Yes, but Never Withdrawn’: Readers Respond to a Dwindling Catholic Monastery
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Version 0 of 1. In mid-February, as a reporter for The Times’s new Surfacing residency, Stephen Hiltner spent five days among the cloistered monks at a small Catholic monastery in South Carolina — shooting photographs, conducting interviews, attending prayer services and private meetings, and witnessing a group of men enact a strict set of Trappist traditions whose origins date back nearly a thousand years. When the resulting article, which explores how Mepkin Abbey’s 13 remaining monks are preparing for an uncertain future, published online this past weekend, it elicited a number of moving responses from Times readers, many of whom offered up anecdotes about their own brushes with monastic life. Some readers, like Brian Hogan, were once monks themselves. Others had volunteered at Mepkin. Paddy Linehan — who emailed Stephen to say that he read his article and “become nostalgic” — offered up a heartwarming tale about a monk at Ireland’s Mount Melleray Abbey named Father Cornelius, who, in the late 1950s and early ’60s, served as something of a housemaster to Mr. Linehan, then a boarding student at school attached to Mount Melleray. “In 1957, one early morning in October, he came to the dormitory and tapped my sleeping foot with his breviary,” Mr. Linehan wrote, “and nodded that I should rise. I did. He took me outside and, pointing out a moving star over the Knockmealdown Mountains, said: ‘That is the first satellite in space. I know you are interested in things like that, so I thought you should see it.’ ” “He knew everything,” Mr. Lineham wrote. “It may sound unbelievable, but he was the most reality-informed person I have ever met.” Below is a collection of responses to the article — many of which appeared as comments on the original article, and some of which were emailed to Stephen and published with the writers’ permission. Some have been edited for length and clarity. Brian Hogan, from Fontainebleau, France, was a Trappist novice at Gethsemani Abbey near Bardstown, Ky., from 1957 to 1959. He said he was attracted to life in the monastery after seeing how the monks were the exact opposite of the big city parish priests he was raised with. I was a Trappist novice under Thomas Merton at Gethsemani Abbey (Mepkin’s mother-house) for two years after high school graduation in the late 1950s. The Trappists have changed since those days, when Trappist-Cistercian life was a lot tougher: constant obligatory silence; the use of sign language; sleeping on a straw-filled mattress in a small cell within a common dormitory; one full meal per day, and no meat, fish or eggs; no recreation or vacation; mail written to and received from family four times per year, and one annual family visit of three days; up at 2:15 a.m., in church at 2:30 a.m. to chant matins and lauds until 4:00 a.m.; a 7 p.m. bedtime; never going outside the monastic grounds. … And yet, adjusting to life outside the monastery after I left was infinitely harder than adjusting to the monastery itself. I learned that in at least one Asian country, it is expected that a young man will become a monk for a year or two. I strongly recommend one or two years as a monk. Robert Sorrels, from Ajo, Ariz., stumbled into a monastery outside Sonoita in Southern Arizona in the early 1970s where he was traveling with just “a knapsack, a sleeping bag, a flute and my thumb.” He cannot recall the name of the monastery he stayed in, but he remembers that it felt new to him. “I’d thought anything Catholic would be old,” he wrote in an email. A fellow road warrior told me, “Go to the Tappers down SR80. They don’t talk. Work for food. Don’t have to sleep in the trees.” A nod. He went east. I went west. So I wandered in. Long walk from a back road. A man in a dress came out, nodded, made a weird sign with his hands. “Welcome. If you are hungry, take and eat. If you wish to stay: We take a vow of silence. Work softly with us.” So I did. Split wood. Hauled water. Listened to the soft murmur of chant. And I was silent. Some tiny something, some soft scream, some pith of silence. Ten days, I went back to the road perhaps towards that small salvation. Paddy Linehan, an Irishman living in Thailand, shared his remembrances of Father Cornelius, a housemaster of sorts at the boarding school attached to Mount Melleray Abbey in County Waterford, Ireland. “I honestly feel he had some means of extracting some form of knowledge/energy from the environment or universe,” he wrote of Father Cornelius in an email. I spent five years, from 1956 to 1961, as a boarding student at Mount Melleray, in County Waterford. Now, at 75, if I ever have a decision to make that involves morality or ethics, I refer back to those years. We had a man in charge of us students — not teaching, but like a housemaster — named Father Cornelius. He has remained my icon in life. The most just man, the most insightful and, surprisingly, the best informed. Despite being in an enclosed order, he knew everything! In 1957, one early morning in October, he came to the dormitory and tapped my sleeping foot with his breviary, and nodded that I should rise. I did. He took me outside and, pointing out a moving star over the Knockmealdown Mountains, said: “That is the first satellite in space. I know you are interested in things like that, so I thought you should see it.” He pointed out many other important marks in my life. There has been no better indicator of things that matter. I kept in touch with him until his death about three or four years ago. Victoria Pedrick, from Washington, D.C., has attended retreats at Mepkin Abbey on two occasions. Although not Roman Catholic, Ms. Pedrick said that her religion is not an issue and that the other retreatants come from different religious backgrounds as well. The most important takeaway from her times at the abbey is a “freshly tuned ear for listening,” she said in an email. She continued: “It’s astonishing how much ‘gunk,’ psychic and otherwise, can block my ability to hear what others are saying and what God might be saying, and a retreat is an irreplaceable chance to open myself up again.” I have made two retreats at Mepkin Abbey and can testify to its graciousness and to the hospitality of the monks. Silent, yes, but never withdrawn — whenever I entered the choir set aside for retreatants, the monks as they entered their choir would smile and nod in a connectedness that needed no words. It is a holy place indeed. Victoria Schindler, from Hillsborough, N.C., visited a monastery outside Atlanta while studying Humanistic Psychology at graduate school in 1975. The monks made an impression on her for looking younger than their biological age. When I attended college I visited the Trappist Monastery in Georgia. The visit has stayed with me all my life. The monks had avoided all the stress of the wars and much of the traumas we all read about in newspapers everyday. Our group of young psychologists were stunned at how young all the monks appeared, none of them looked their age, their faces were unlined and relaxed. When we guessed their age we were usually off by twenty years! Here was proof that staying away from the knowledge of wars/murders and the constant barrage of negative news could lead to a happier and healthy life. Walter Rhett, from Charleston, S.C., visits Mepkin Abbey often. As an African-American man, he says he still finds beauty and solace at the monastery despite the fact that it was once the estate of Henry Laurens, a merchant and slave trader who lived during the 1700s. “Because of Henry Laurens’ particular place in the America’s trade of the enslaved, my knowledge and embrace of him as an African-American is a strange tale of contrasts,” he wrote in an email. “I often sit in his pew and pray at St. Michael’s Church. I am drawn to the abbey as a sacred site and Laurens in the spirit of reconciliation.” |