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The Orchards of Perseverance: Conversations with Trappist Monks About God, Their Lives, and the World by David D. Perata, St. Theresa's Press, 201 pp.; $19.95, paper
At the last official count (January 1, 1999), there were 2,383 Trappist monks in the world. The Trappist order ranks 20th in membership among religious Roman Catholic orders, just ahead of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (with 2,308 members) and just three behind the Priests of the Sacred Heart (2,386). In other words, there are about as many Trappists in the world as there are students at one small liberal arts college, like Middlebury or Colorado College. By comparison, the Jesuits number 21,955, while the three principal orders of Franciscans together number 33,500. When it comes to religious orders for men, the Trappists are small potatoes (though admittedly not as small as the 42-member Servants of the Holy Paraclete, the smallest order). Still the Trappists, and their parent order the Benedictines (which rank fifth at 8,281 members), seem to exert an influence today far beyond their numbers.
This is no doubt partly due to the popularity of Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain, which described his journey into the Trappist life, as well as his many other works, most of which in one form or another extol virtues characteristic of Trappist life: silence, prayer, meditation, and the like. As our era's pace, complexity, and noise have in creased exponentially, the Trappists' spiritual rigors have become increasingly attractive. Until a few years ago, on top of vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, Trappists also took a vow of silence, and observed a precise and detailed order of living, down to the placement and style of tableware (e.g., two-handed mugs and wooden spoons and forks were mandatory).
Along with the rest of post-Vatican Catholicism, Trappists have loosened some of their characteristic rules, though not their main vocation: prayer. They continue to do little "useful" by modern standards: no hospitals for the sick nor food pantries for the poor, no preaching to convert sinners. They offer their monasteries as retreat centers for pilgrims; they labor (usually in agriculture and/or hand crafts) to sustain their communities economically. And they pray.
It's very, very simple—the sort of thing hyperactive, terminally exhausted evangelicals like me regard with envy. Wouldn't that be wonderful, we think, to free ourselves from cell phones and cable TV, from building and grounds committees and soccer coaching, from the constant hum of industrialized living and the endless stretch of concrete and asphalt (it is one of the world's modern wonders to me that an unbroken stretch of pavement connects my home in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, to the home of my brother in Mission Viejo, California—not to mention thousands of other destinations). Wouldn't it be a dream instead to spend one's life in the quiet confines of an agricultural community, to work with our hands, to give spiritual direction to others, and to pray—to commune with God, to become intimate with things divine, to perhaps enjoy mystical union.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that books on the monastic life have been spilling from publishers' offices. The latest surge began with Kathleen Norris's The Cloister Walk (Riverhead, 1997), whose winsome retelling of her retreats with Benedictine monks alerted us once more to the spiritual possibilities inherent in the monastic way. In Beyond the Walls: Monastic Wisdom for Everyday Life (Doubleday, 1999), Paul Wilkes relays the insights he gained by spending a year, on and off, with Trappist monks of Mepkin Abbey in South Carolina. Matt Murray not only sheds light on the unique dynamics of his family's life but also gives us a peek into the mysterious attraction of monasticism in The Father and the Son: My Father's Journey into the Monastic Life (HarperCollins, 1999).
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