Resurrecting Solitude : Determined Priest Travels a Winding Road to Found America’s First Monastic Order--in a Nebraska Barn

The road to monastic seclusion is narrow, anything but straight, and paved all the way with ruts, mud holes and jagged, oil-pan-bending boulders.

“If you can’t make it up to the monastery, stop off at my farm and borrow the horse,” suggested Dick Childs, in all Nebraska seriousness, at the gas station in town.

The car bogged down, but Father Clifford Stevens, the founding--and so far the only--monk at the Monastery of Tintern, came to the rescue in a muddy front-wheel-drive vehicle.

“The county promised to improve this road, but I’m not sure we want better accessibility,” Stevens shouted over the engine knocks as the barn-like monastery came into sight around the last tortuous bend. “Our aim is to keep the world at a distance, not because it’s evil, but because solitude to a monk is freedom, the freedom to pursue God with the intensity of a lover seeking a rendezvous with his beloved.”

The silence of the deep surrounding woods was broken only by a great blue heron lifting off with powerful flapping wings over the dove-shaped pond.

Americans, Stevens said with regret, have always looked down on the contemplative life as a waste of human resources. But he summoned Albert Camus, the French existentialist, as a witness for the defense of solitude:

“There are no more deserts. There are no more islands. Yet one still feels the need of them. To understand this world, one must sometimes turn away from it; to serve men better one must hold them at a distance.”

Stevens, a former Air Force chaplain who has flown at twice the speed of sound in an F-104 and once applied for astronaut training--”They never even answered my letter”--spoke enthusiastically of the joys of living a life of silence as he showed off the tiny, 8-by-12-foot rough pine cubicles where the monks would sleep on slat-board beds and straw mattresses that would stir the inmates of Attica to bang their mess trays against the bars.

“If Hugh Hefner can found a Playboy empire, I can help recover a tradition that has been lost for 700 years,” Stevens said. His Monks of Tintern would be America’s first monastic order and the first new order anywhere since the servites in the 13th Century.

Four Pillars

“Our community will be built on the four pillars of solitude, study, the chanting of the Psalms and the celebration of the Eucharist,” he continued, leading the way up a spiral staircase to the library and skylight-roofed chapel.

“The monks will engage in no business or commerce. There will be none of what Thomas Merton called, ‘Holy Jesus, buy our cheeses.’ The contemplative life is primary. When you have a business, it becomes secondary and the monks become employees.

“The problem with many monasteries today is the economic side has become the dominant side: selling wines, jellies, vestments and even shaving lotions. Some European nuns work in breweries and chocolate factories, and there’s an American monastery turning out 15,000 loaves of bread a day.”

The 59-year-old priest sees modern Tintern, born again from the ruins of 12th-Century Tintern Abbey in Wales, as a theological think tank.

However, instead of hovering over an illuminated manuscript in the Theologiae Sacrae Sanctuarium--the reading room--the modern monk of Tintern would be bent over a computer terminal inputting data into a theological bank specializing in the works of Thomas Aquinas. The information stored would be made available to scholars around the world, “who could code into our network.”

Stevens envisions a community of scholars, sculptors, poets, potters and--above all--theologians. For 25 years he has been compiling his order’s constitution. It outlines a 10-year training for the monks in philosophy, theology, research methods and Latin, Greek and Hebrew, the Biblical languages.

Even after taking final vows and his ordination as a priest, the monk of Tintern would pursue advanced theological studies with videotapes, lectures and a tutorial system “similar to St. John’s at Annapolis.”

“I’ve had 300 inquiries already,” Stevens said enthusiastically. “Young people are weary of the materialism of the world and turning to God. It’s not an escape; they’re fleeing toward something.”

At that moment, the phone rang. A priest from Atlanta, a specialist in Canon Law, was interested in joining the community. “Within 10 years,” Stevens was telling him, “there will be monasteries like this in every state. We are witnessing a vast explosion of the ascetic life.”

Over coffee, the founder monk, awaiting his first novices, admitted: “Realistically, only one in 20 will stay. It’s like medical school, but requiring greater commitment. The monks will spend the rest of their lives here. I have a lovely graveyard picked out in a grove of cottonwoods near an old Pawnee burial ground.”

In Protestant northeast Nebraska, where within the memory of older farmers Ku Klux Klansmen burned crosses and Catholics defended their fields and churches with shotguns, Stevens donned the white-hooded robe with leather belt and wine-colored scapular (shoulder covering) that he had designed for the Monks of Tintern.

“It’s a wash-and-wear fabric, not unbleached muslin like the monks’ robes in the Middle Ages. I’m not an antiquarian and I’m not into nostalgia. This monastery has a washing machine, showers, a microwave oven and a Xerox instead of paintbrushes and parchment for copying manuscripts.”

Building Planned

He displayed a Lincoln, Neb., architect’s rendering of a $3.2-million monastery, inspired by the ruins of Tintern Abbey, which he hopes will replace the barn structure within the decade.

Work is scheduled to begin on one wing next spring.

Dawn came with a golden pinkish glow, like stained glass, on the frost-rimmed window of the guest cubicle, the rich aroma of freshly brewed coffee and, from the chapel overhead, a Gregorian chant in a resonant baritone. Even before the first novices arrive, Stevens endeavors to follow the horarium, or daily schedule, prescribed in his constitution and patterned after the 6th-Century rule of St. Benedict.

He rises at 3 a.m. to chant the Psalms greeting a new day. Time on the monastic clock is ticked off by the chanting of Lauds, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline, which divide the day into periods of work, study, sung prayer and simple, meatless meals. Bedtime for the Monk of Tintern is 8 p.m.

How to Blow Noses

His aim is to keep the life simple. By the Middle Ages, some monasteries had so expanded on the Benedictine rule that monks were told how to blow their noses “so as to give the least offense to the attending angels.” Others administered vast estates, vineyards and copying houses in an atmosphere of silence through an elaborate system of hissing and sign language.

“We will not use any sign language here. If anything important has to be said, say it,” Stevens said over a breakfast of black coffee, plain bread and orange juice served against a background of more Gregorian chant pouring from a tape recorder.

“Gregorian chant will be our only music. It’s the best around, a precious treasure handed down by centuries of monastic tradition,” he said, changing cassettes. “A lot of contemporary church music is just bad music. We’ve ended up with a country-and-western Mass.”

After his morning Mass, attended by several farm families who braved the road in their Sunday best and were rewarded with the celebrant’s fine singing, no sermon and no collection, Stevens spoke briefly of his background.

Father a Chef

He was born in Brattleboro, Vt., the son of a chef who died when Clifford was 9. One day the famous Father Edward T. Flanagan came to lecture in town. Young Stevens followed him to his hotel room and, with his mother’s permission, begged to finish high school at Boys Town in Omaha, Neb.

He graduated from Boys Town High in 1944 and, after working for a year in the wartime shipyards on the West Coast, entered New Mellory Abbey, a Trappist monastery in Dubuque, Iowa. Here he spent five “deliriously happy years,” but left because he thought the emphasis was “too much on the ascetic and not enough on the intellectual life.”

Resuming his seminary studies, he was ordained a priest in the diocese of Omaha in 1956. He celebrated his first Mass at Boys Town and, after several years of parish work, became an Air Force chaplain. His flock included the test pilots and astronauts at Edwards Air Force Base in California, where he hitched rides on jets breaking the sound barrier and wrote a book on “astrotheology.”

Changed Milk to Water

While on duty with the Alaska Air Command in Anchorage, he recalled with a grin, he worked the “miracle” of changing milk into holy water.

“The guys out on the radar stations were dying for fresh milk. I mooched a half-dozen five-gallon cans from the mess hall, but the load sergeant down on the flight line wouldn’t allow them on board the cargo planes. He was afraid they might go bad in flight. I asked if holy water was OK. He nodded, I blessed the cans and off they went.”

All the while, this 5-foot-4 dynamo of a man kept refining the constitution for his dream monastery.

When the brass threatened a desk job as his next assignment, Maj. Stevens resigned his commission, became executive editor of The Priest magazine, for a time was publisher of his own short-lived magazine for priests and directed an institute for theological studies in Santa Fe, N.M. He then returned to pastoral duties in Nebraska’s corn-and-beef country.

Wrote a Novel

Doubleday published his novel “Flame Out of Dorset,” based on the life of St. Steven Harding, the 12th-Century Cistercian abbot who ranks as one of his heroes, along with the English contemplatives St. Cuthbert and St. Hugh of Lincoln.

Obsessed by his dream, the small-town pastor searched for sites for his monastery in the Caribbean, Wyoming, Colorado and the Canadian Rockies. He might still be hunting had the adult education program in Neligh, Neb., offered something besides “ballroom dancing and macrame.”

Seeking something more intellectual, Charlotte Clemensen Taylor, a Methodist and a widow, signed up for the course in Hebrew that Stevens was offering at the St. Francis parish hall. Learning of his love for solitude, she offered the use of the 240-acre family farm out on Cedar Creek for private prayer and meditation.

Stevens immediately recognized the ideal site for his monastery. Taylor talked her sister and two brothers into selling to Stevens the farm that had been in the Clemensen family for 70 years. A retired farm couple, Joe and Emma Velder of Petersburg, Neb., donated $100,000 toward the purchase. Other donations, including $10,000 from a retired railroad engineer, came in. John Frey, who had lost his farm at nearby Tilden, set to work building the barn monastery and all its furniture with the help of his four sons.

Tintern Ruins

A coincidence settled on the name Tintern for the world’s newest monastery. After returning from a trip to Europe, visiting various abbeys, Stevens came to Hebrew class with a place mat he had bought as a gift for his best student. Taylor, in turn, had brought a faded snapshot she wanted identified. It showed her late husband, who went overseas with the Navy in World War I, posing by some ancient ruins. Both views were of Tintern Abbey.

“Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous,” said Taylor, who at 74 devotes much of her time to getting the monastery ready for the first novices. This devout Methodist has quilted comforters for their beds, embroidered altar cloths and carved Tintern’s wooden entrance sign, which reads, in Hebrew: “In the beginning.”

There have been setbacks too. Deer ate the 1,000 Christmas trees Stevens planted to make the monastery self-supporting. A professional fund-raising drive to launch the permanent monastery went nowhere when farms in the area began to fail. A dozen prospective novices have come and gone. “One young man couldn’t understand not talking. Another thought the life too intellectual. Others didn’t like Gregorian chant.”

Life at Tintern West will be devoid of newspapers, magazines, radio and TV. There will be no alcohol, “except for a festive glass of wine on major feast days,” and no recreation or sports, except jogging. But it will not be a life without unspoken humor.

Already there is a sign at the edge of the dove-shaped pond: “No Walking On Water.”