Visiting With the Men of God

Dawn brings rain to the desert.

The road to the monastery climbs through a lunar landscape in Valyermo, where the southeast Antelope Valley gives way to the San Gabriel Mountains. The gate of St. Andrew’s Priory appears amid clumps of Joshua trees. The sign says: “No Hunting--Except For Peace.”

Father Luke rings a bell mounted on a tree outside the chapel. Monks in black hooded robes approach from the cloister, a compound of former farm buildings where they live.

The guests approach from their quarters, bent against the rain.

The monks arrange themselves in pews around the stone altar. White tennis shoes peek out from beneath one robe. Two cantors lead the congregation, about 15 monks and 15 guests, through the psalmody. The prayers are a mixture of song and chant. The voices reverberate, sweet and precise in the small wooden chapel.

The reading describes the Lord’s words to Job out of the whirlwind: “Thus far shall ye come and no further. Here shall your proud ways be stayed.”

St. Andrew’s seems far more than 80 miles from the anger and frenzy of the city. The 800-acre monastery was once a ranch, where monks of a Belgian congregation resettled in the 1950s after the Communist takeover forced them to abandon their monastery in China.

The centuries-old Rule of St. Benedict structures the life of the 25 monks around prayer, work and hospitality. The continuous stream of guests includes Catholic, Protestant and Jewish groups on retreats. Individuals come in need of help or advice. Or just a couple of days of refuge.

“Monasteries carried culture and civilization through the dark ages,” says Father John, who has been Prior for 16 years.

He bears a slight resemblance to the actor Hal Holbrook and is known to roll up his sleeves and repair cars. “Towns grew up around monasteries because the rest of life was chaos. In our age people do not move here physically, but they are with us spiritually.”

The day starts at 6 a.m. with the first of six communal prayers, Vigils. An hour of personal prayer follows, then the morning service, Lauds, and a silent breakfast.

Light streams into the high-ceilinged dining room through a glass wall. Silence turns breakfast with 30 people into something of a transcendental experience. Each act--buttering a piece of toast, passing the sugar, a nodded greeting--takes on ritualistic solemnity.

The monks observe the “Grand Silence” from 8:30 p.m. until after breakfast. They are permitted to speak to guests, if necessary. Father Luke, a black-haired man with a cultured voice and a medical degree, says the silence allows you to listen to God.

“Listening to God in creation, through people, through the birds in the trees,” he says. “What is one of the things people find the most difficult to do? Listen.”

After breakfast, some guests talk in the lounge. Others sit near the Chinese garden watching the drizzle and the ducks and geese gliding in the pond.

The monks have work to do. Father Isaac meets with a salesman about supplies. The novices take a singing class. In a library overflowing with volumes, bespectacled Father Wilhelm prepares for work at the computer, shaking his head at his cluttered office.

“It is the mess out of which comes order,” he says.

The monastery supports itself with income from an annual fall festival, sales of apples from its orchards, and donations from guests, who are asked to pay what they can. The biggest revenue source is the sale of ceramics the monastery Mass produces, designed by Father Maur. In the workshop, Wenceslao Tobar cuts a clay figurine from its mold. Other workers prepare hundreds of the figurines for baking in two kilns.

Father Luke describes Father Maur, a Belgian, as having a “wonderful sense of humor, of Jesus with real people.” There are examples on the walls: Plates showing Jesus and friends roller skating at Venice Beach. Jesus in a four-wheel drive vehicle. A “television angel” watching the tube--a vice prohibited at St. Andrew’s, except for the evening news.

So the black satellite dish donated by a friend of the monastery is an incongruous sight in the cloister, as are barbells on a porch. The monks live off a dim corridor in what could be an extremely ascetic version of a dorm at a small, poor college.

Brother Peter’s room is paradise compared to the prisons of Communist China, where the tiny 63-year-old Chinese monk spent 27 years as a political prisoner after the Chinese monastery was shut down. He was released in 1984 and reunited with his brothers in Valyermo several years later.

Brother Peter laughs rapidly as he displays photos of his audience with the Pope. He rolls up his sleeves to show arms and hands scarred and twisted by the shackles of solitary confinement. Brother Peter composed and memorized thousands of poems in prison. Now, in the little room filled with books and papers containing his memoirs, he writes and translates the poems into English.

One poem is entitled “Tight Handcuffs Come From Heaven.” A poem dedicated to his typist concludes: “Over a hundred poems have been restored one by one. The remaining poems still sleep in my mind. On what day will they awaken from their dreams?”

The monks gather at the sacristy to prepare for midday mass. They put white vestments over their robes and file into the chapel as the bell rings.

The pealing of the bell echoes in the snow-topped mountains surrounding the cemetery, rows of wooden crosses on a hill overlooking the grounds.

A tall sculpture on the hill symbolizes the “eye of the needle” which Christ referred to in an encouragement to poverty and humility: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God.”

The rain falls on crosses marking monks’ graves. The crosses bear no names.