Wake Forest Magazine June 2003 - Past Issues - Wake Forest ...

SOUNDS
OF
SILENCE
By Susannah Rosenblatt (’03)
A student discovers that for Trappist brothers, silence
is something deep and rich, a dynamic force vital to
their lives of solitary contemplation.
It feels foolish whispering in the parking lot. But once we roll
to the end of the holly-lined drive of the Our Lady of Holy
Spirit Abbey, a kind of psychological hush falls on the group.
We smother giggles as we unpack the car. There is no noise
except for a lone dove’s coo. Is this a holy place? I am uncertain
whether God is indeed lurking among the green goose droppings
and tall Georgia pines.
Assistant Professor of Spanish Olgierda Furmanek, with our
class, “Love, Death, and Poetry” in tow, seems to think so. She
has brought our incredulous group of twelve to Conyers,
Georgia, to spend two days with Cistercian Trappist monks.
These fifty men live, work, and pray from their lovely concrete
outcropping nestled in the woods beside a lake.
Furmanek felt immersion in a contemplative environment
would help students better understand the mystical poems we
read in class. “I wanted to structure the course so it really had
to do with one’s life, based on personal experience in a certain
way,” she says. Thanks to a Lilly grant and the support of the
Department of Romance Languages, she was able to show her
students the monastic life firsthand. “If you don’t know how
they lived and what was going through their minds in everyday
life,” she adds, “you can never understand the beauty of the
poems and only appreciate them on a superficial level.”
You can’t get more authentic than Father Luke. An ancient,
robed man, he crackles with energy, blue eyes aflame. Father
Luke is ninety-one but tells everyone he is ninety-two, anticipat-
ing another blessed year. “Ask questions,” he urges us. “You’ll
learn a lot more than you learn in books.” And so we do.
These are men, we discover, who opted out of the 20th
century. Men, like Father Luke, who entered Holy Spirit at its
founding in 1944, who slept in a barn for eight months on the
monastery’s future site and then pitched in for twelve years of
construction to pour the very concrete of the only monastery in
North America actually built by monks. No complaints from
Father Luke: “Remember our Lord was born in a stable,” he says.
The brothers know a bit of the outside world from newspaper
headlines. Times have certainly changed since the Vatican
opened up Trappist monasteries to the public in 1968. Before
then the monks had no contact with the outside world. Now
the monk-cum-concierge Father Gerard wears a pager to accommodate
wayward monastery guests. Prayers are in English these
days, not Latin. Holy Spirit’s booming bonsai tree business
operates from a Web site, www.bonsaimonk.com.
Father Gerard is ambivalent about the encroaching world.
“Limited contact with other people produces deep contact
with God,” he says. Father Gerard does enjoy the interchange
between guests and monks, but with reservation. He tells a
story about a female guest, locked out of her room, who
knocked on his door after hours in a towel in hopes of getting
an extra key. “There’s a positive aspect that’s simply missed by
being (in the guests’ retreat house): deeper celibacy, men not
being around women.”
34 W ake Forest Magazine