Evolution of a Monastery’s Spiritual Path

What does go on in a monastery? In our imaginary abbey there are, first of all, no doubts or struggles. Instead, we picture chubby friars planting petunias and pronouncing a loaf of fresh-baked bread “just heavenly.” They’re cute, all right, but tell the truth: Don’t they seem the slightest bit dumb?

Paul Wilkes’ “Beyond the Walls” brings the reader inside a Trappist monastery, one that has figured in his own spiritual journey. He wants also to bring the monastery’s lessons out and incorporate them into his daily life as a professor and writer. Thus the book chronicles a year of monthly visits, with a topic for each month’s focus, like discernment, chastity and prayer.

The monastery is Mepkin Abbey, on the South Carolina estate once owned by Henry and Clare Boothe Luce. The monks support themselves with the help of 35,000 hard-working Leghorn chickens, which supply supermarkets with eggs and gardeners with what the monks call “Earth Healer” (surely the most elegant euphemism ever bestowed on chicken manure).

Until recently in Trappist history, trafficking in eggs would have been as surprising as a chain of Gandhi burger stands. The 17th century reformation of the Cistercian order at La Trappe, France, was severe: No eggs, milk or other dairy products, no fish or meat, and absolute silence. Physical deprivations were such that a monk’s life span there averaged only seven years. The Trappists, Wilkes says, are the Marines of monastic life.

With Vatican II, religious orders were encouraged to peel off regulatory accretions to adapt to “the changed conditions of our time.” Famed Trappist author Thomas Merton wrote during that era. As religious orders eased their rules, something surprising happened: Fewer men knocked at the monastery door. At Mepkin Abbey, Wilkes says, the average age is 69.

The paradox, of course, is why making things easier didn’t attract more monks. Wilkes says the order’s youngest monks are the most eager for a rigorous spiritual life. He reports this with some puzzlement; his sympathies lie more with the older monks, whom he describes as “more open to change and a more flexible . . . lifestyle.”

Change is a slippery term, of course; at this point in Trappist history, being open to change would entail adopting renewed rigorous standards. But an older man who experienced the freedom of new flexibility 30-some years ago might well be reluctant to let that go. A devout young man, raised in the seasick hedonism of recent decades, might instead hunger for spiritual disciplines that challenge him. Wilkes understands this dynamic, but he betrays just a hint of disapproval toward that younger generation.

If this book has a flaw, it is this quality of emanating from a particular period in recent history. Wilkes was already an adult in 1960, and he writes in the ambling, easy style of gentle people grooving on a Sunday afternoon. His writing is honest and clear as water, but at times it feels as if we’re sitting in a car with the clutch engaged. The monks we meet don’t appear to be cute, dumb and questionless, but on the other hand they don’t appear much at all.

“Beyond the Walls” could have been a narrative about monastic values played out in the lives of actual monks. Instead, Wilkes has written mostly about monastic concepts, with occasional quotes from monks.

These concepts are explored with great patience, at a pace that sometimes strained mine. Wilkes’ expectations are that spiritual progress is modest, new discoveries are subtle and an important rule is “be kind to yourself.” He is not a man without passion; he describes times of sobbing prayer in a swanky resort room, of living in dramatic poverty, of storming from the dinner table in tears when his sons snicker at his mealtime prayer. This is not a man without vivid emotion, but in the monastery it gets muffled.

Emotion is rightly recognized as a spiritual trap; much of the journey, as Wilkes frequently says, is a matter of just doing it. It’s only in obedience that stubborn human will is shaped to the divine. But something is wrong when the “spiritual” aspects of a book are also its most tepid.

Wilkes presents his faults without guile, but also without the heartbroken repentance characterizing monastic writing for 2,000 years. Unflinching sorrow for our sins, Jesus said, stuns us with the height of God’s forgiveness and charges our hearts with love. The alternative may be placid but not all that transforming.

Perhaps monastic life in recent decades offers two poles, placidity or transformation. Perhaps it was the gift of a generation newly freed from rules to show us the tranquil, “flexible” approach to spiritual life. Perhaps it will be the gift of a new generation to take up the ancient tools of asceticism and, spurred by passionate love for Jesus Christ, strive like athletes (as St. Paul says) toward the goal set before them.

Frederica Mathewes-Green is the author of “At the Corner of East and Now” and “Facing East.”