Religion: Forsaking All Pleasures

The road to Coolspring, in Virginia, is pleasant in early spring. Down the Blue Ridge slopes into the Shenandoah Valley, roadside plaques mark historic battles and gallant deeds of bygone days. At the foot of the mountains, the route to Coolspring becomes a mud road that could not have been very different in the days when Washington surveyed the area. Finally the road turns in at a gate marked “Monastery” and rolls across pastureland to an ancient fieldstone house on a hill.

There the visitor drops another 700 years into the past.

Corks in a Bottle. The Cistercian monastery of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, at Coolspring, is the ninth Trappist community in the U.S., the newest in full operation, and follows the full medieval rule. Last week, on the 950 acres surrounding the mansion which was once the scene of glittering Southern balls, 32 Trappists were busily preparing for their silent life of work, prayer and meditation. Since last July, they have added a dormitory, dining hall, wing for offices and kitchen. The old kitchen building has been turned into a simple chapel, with highly polished stalls. “The only trouble with the stalls,” said burly Father Peter, “one of the few Trappists permitted to talk to visitors, “is that they are just 18 inches wide, and I’m 22 inches across.”

Added Father Gabriel, the third Superior, who is portly, too: “When we rise, it sounds like corks coming out of a bottle.”

The monks and novices live in a long file of cubicles, each about four feet across and just long enough to accommodate a narrow, iron-hard sleeping pallet. They do not sleep in their own coffins (as legend says Trappists once did), but the mattresses are hard as a slab in a city morgue. The 60 men are gradually learning the manual labor necessary to run a big estate. At the moment, most of them are hopelessly inept. “The supposition,” laments Father Gabriel, “is that Trappists are great agriculturists. But that isn’t the case here. They’re all city kids.” The community is fattening 200 steers, starting a large vegetable garden and 75 acres of corn. Next year it may begin making Oka cheese, a Trappist specialty.

As a group, the Trappists are healthy, youthful, happy-looking. Many are under 20; most are well-educated. They include many war veterans, to whom the Trappist life has a great appeal, and a converted Jewish psychiatrist who is the monastery doctor.

The Penitential-Life. Like other Trappists, those at Coolspring have forsaken all pleasures, occupy just enough space and use just enough food and clothing to sustain a penitential life. Everybody is equal. Even the abbot and the older monks do their share of menial labor. Differences of opinion are settled by majority vote.

For example, Father Gabriel wanted the new monastery (to be built as soon as the community’s “precarious finances” permit) in front of the old manor house, so it would be the first structure visitors would see. “But I was howled down,” he said. “The monastery will be built on the heights in back of the building.”

In time, the Coolspring community will be almost completely self-sustaining. Then the only contact with the 20th Century will be occasional visitors, and the telephone in the chapter office. At the moment, though, the white-robed figures are seen all over the countryside, and there is a great bustle at Coolspring itself. In another year, when the building and organizing are over, the cloistered, contemplative life will be a fact.

What makes men take up the rigorous life of a Trappist? Father Gabriel, who was a secular priest for 22 years in his native San Francisco, joined the Trappists “to be alone with God.” Said he: “There is a great religious revival in the world. People are getting away from the material, and back to God. They are rejecting the negative. With people in that state of mind, then, is it any wonder that this order is having a great revival? Where else can you escape the materialism and negation of the world? Where can you get closer to God in this life?”

In the current issue of the Catholic World, the most famed U.S. Trappist has denied sundry rumors about himself. Wrote Thomas Merton, author of The Seven Storey Mountain: “Among the peculiar stories I have heard about myself are these : I am supposed to have been seen at the Stork Club in New York . . . Someone was going about telling people that I had been lecturing at Columbia University . . . There was a big rumor to the effect that I had developed cancer and had been flown in a special plane, chartered by Cardinal Dougherty, to the Misericordia Hospital in Philadelphia . . . Many people have thought that I was . . . planning to join the new American Carthusian Foundation … I have no intention of becoming a Carthusian.”

Added Author Merton: “Some people seem to think that as soon as a monk does anything like writing a book, he necessarily loses his vocation. As a matter of fact, my writing has immensely helped my vocation, although … it is still a hard job to fit it into our strict life of prayer.”