Alberic's blog

Crossing Monastery Road in the dark this morning, at about 4:30 a.m., my eyes are drawn up the driveway of Holy Family Church which rises to a crest upon which the church is set with its proud little steeple. I see the facade barely illumined by a single street lamp on the drive way at the base of the front steps. I am exhilarated but that is only a surface emotion.

I am walking in the dark. It's about 4:30 a.m. and I am outside – not on an errand or to accomplish anything at all, but in response to a movement awakened inside me after the monks and I finished praying “Vigils” together. I want to walk. I want to be outside; to feel the chill air on my face and savor the unexpected mingling of scents and sounds of nature. As I round the corner of the garage, the asphalt becomes aglow.

I've finished my breakfast. Only one or two monks remain in the spacious refectory as I make my way through the wide door at the East end, and head toward the scullery. Here, I find the monks' discarded dishes neatly placed in several racks. Later, after mass, Brother Robert will send the racks through a dishwasher / sterilizer.

There are several rather distinctive features to the breakfast of a Trappist monk. It is eaten in the dark. At New Melleray, we are sitting down to our first meal of the day at a little after four in the morning. The large windows lining the south wall are black and, since it is Spring, they are open, but at this time in the morning no sound enters. The birds are asleep.

Father Alanus is always the first one to the toaster. Father Andrew, with his long legs, lopes into the refectory holding a large tin cup of coffee and his bible in one hand. Brother Placid typically stays in church for a few minutes after Vigils ends.

“All those who are working tonight, those who in their suffering cannot sleep, those who use the night to do evil, those who are afraid of the day about to dawn, may they all come out into your light . . .” The office of Vigils, our first prayer service of the day is ending. My brother monks and I, like “sentries” standing on the wall of a fortress, gaze expectantly into the face of night, looking for the Lord's return.

It's not like he committed a grave sin. It's nothing really, we all forget things. It's about 3:45 a.m., the monks are praying the office of Vigils, and Stanislaus forgot he is the reader. He is supposed to stand up and walk to the lectern about one minute after we finish praying the psalm.

“In September, 1930, he had his first contact with the Trappist monastery of San Isidoro. He was seduced by the silent beauty of the monastery and bewitched by the soaring melodies of the Salve Regina at Compline.” We are near the end of our celebration of the office of Vigils at about four in the morning.

We are a diverse group, we monks of New Melleray, and at 3:30 in the morning it shows. We are American monks and our individualism is apparent even though the church is scarcely lit. The brothers are gathering for Vigils, the first prayer service of the day.

I enter the chapel at a little before three thirty in the morning to find it almost completely dark. A single light in the guest section at the back is all that illumines the huge space. There isn't a sound.

Vigils begins at 3:30 a.m.  It is 3:25 a.m. as I leave the washroom, and there are two routes I can take to get to the chapel: I can go through the basement corridor's to the main staircase to the sacristy, (not the scenic route), or I can go the outside way, along the sidewalk behind the monastery.  It is Spring, and I want to be outside.

A man is entitled to a little privacy when engaged in the sometimes unlovely task of waking himself up in the morning. This can be hard – especially at 3:15 in the morning and you would prefer not to have others around when you do this. But a monk has no choice. We share a common washroom.

Sam, the manager at Trappist Caskets is heading home and says, on his way out: “Happy Birthday Carolyn!” I look up and say - “Oh – happy birthday.” She smiles appreciatively.“You want me to sing for you?” “No.” And then, after a moment: “Though I know you can sing very nicely.”  I am copying names into the "Memory Book", the names of each person who was buried in a Trappist Casket this week.

I am copying the names of customers into the “Memory Book” at Trappist Caskets. Sam, the manager, is heading home and says, on his way out: “Happy Birthday Carolyn!” I look up from my book and say - “Oh – happy birthday.” She smiles appreciatively.

One day, a few weeks ago, leaving my cell, at about 3:20 a.m., I arrived in the Boot Room, before anyone else had arrived to turn the lights on and was startled to discover Brother Albert there – brushing his teeth in the dark.

Placido, sitting between two cabinets on the South side of the sacristy is seated and bent over what looks like a small stack of three by five cards in his hand. Watching him is making me a little nervous. The scene in the sacristy before the Easter Vigil is always a bit tense. The bell wakes us up at 11:45 p.m. which is something quite startling for a monk who goes to bed at 7:30.

“Is he going to the Greeks?” “Is he going to kill himself?” “What is Jesus talking about?” The helplessness and confusion of Jesus' disciples pains me and distracts me from the mystery I intended to contemplate on Holy Thursday. I should be meditating on the Lord's Supper – the institution of that sacrament which the church calls the “source and summit” of it's life, but my thoughts veer off and keep missing the target.

I guess a monk can be forgiven for becoming a little too passionate while reading his part in the gospel account of the Passion of Jesus Christ for the liturgy on Passion Sunday. The solemn reading of the Passion, by two monks, is the most distinctive aspect of the liturgy we celebrated yesterday. Father Aelred, was asked to read the part of the narrator, and as he read, with seventy or so guests listening intently, he became more and more emotional.

I am awake. I don't actually need a bell to get me out of bed. And so the bell's sudden interruption of the silence is jarring. I am already sitting upright in a hard wooden chair, with a reading about beatitude spread in my lap, my spirit quietly exulting in a moment outside of time. I could be in heaven. But I'm not. The bell is proof. At exactly 3:15 a.m.

Not everybody would think sitting perfectly still and your back straightened by an oak chair with a book spread in your lap at 2:45 in the morning is something to relish, but I do – and this is how I begin each day in the monastery. This is not an original idea of mine. For centuries, monks have devoted the best hours of the day to “Lectio Divina”, (Divine Reading). Well, for me, the best hour of the day is the first.

At about ten minutes before two o'clock this morning, I awoke suddenly and was momentarily startled to find myself in a monk's cell on the third floor of a Trappist monastery situated in the middle of a corn field outside of Peosta Iowa. The surprise was short-lived. I have been a monk for twenty five years. I have awakened thousands of times in a monk's bed.

“We often hear people speak of “phobias”, Albin tells the monks. The abbot is away and Brother Albin, the sub-prior, is delivering the evening Chapter Talk in his absence. My brothers and I are seated around him in a “U”; his own chair set against the South wall of the Chapter Room.

Brother Kevin's voice was hushed and he sounded amazed: “Are you saying that Father Daniel won't be doing the 10:30 mass any more?” Brother Phillip, the infirmarian, replied: “Very likely not.” Father Daniel is 104 years old. Every morning, in the lovely little chapel attached to the infirmary, he presides at mass.

For a day to end, to be rounded out and really complete, it seems to me, it must be concluded in a monk's cell. This thought comes to me almost every night as I prepare to go to bed. The statement is biased of course, but I am reluctant to retract it, and instead, revisit again and again in my mind.

“Well – they're entitled to their opinion . . .” The words were spoken casually; a little flippantly, and I felt something like a little jolt of electricity pass through my jaw and heat suffuse my face, but inside, not warmth . . . something cold.

A young man, inquiring at the monastery recently, and observing all the older monks, began to inquire about the sustainability of the monastery. “I am attracted to monastic life, but I ask myself: Is there going to be a monastery here when I am 50? Will the monastic community be able to sustain the costs of caring for so many older monks?

A distraction praying at Vigils this morning – was it some kind of “vision”? I see Christ a tiny spider, despised, and spurned by the world, for two thousand years quietly spinning a vast glistening web spread wide and covering the whole earth. From time to time, a little fly, attracted by its shimmering in the bright beams of the sun, touches the web and is caught by it's attraction.

Now I am annoyed.  I'm a Trappist monk who has consecrated his life to God in a monastery where my life is wholly ordered toward contemplation of God's mysteries; day is inclining toward evening; I am serenely making my way through a cloister whose faint light and arched windows exquisitely evoke a thousand years of monastic history; I am peaceful, happy, recollected, and looking forward to Vespers – and suddenly find myself being tailgated!

It is Sunday morning and the monks have assembled for the Abbot's Sunday conference, all of us sitting in a “horse-shoe” shape with Abbot Brendan, the Prior on his right and the Sub-Prior on his left seated in three chairs at the head of the Chapter House.

Every monastery has a Brother Cassian; the monk who fastidiously writes out the names of each monk alongside his daily work assignment, the whole arranged in neat rows and neatly printed – and saved for years in envelopes, each identified with a particular week; four envelopes preserving a record of the work assignments for the month, twelve envelopes bundled in chronological order specifying the work assignment for every brother in the community for each day of the year; all this labo