blue cloud abbey

Vol. 19 No. 2                                                         Marvin SD 57251                                                               Summer 2008

THE MINNESOTA BOYCHOIR

   The Minnesota Boychoir, with members from the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area, performed a concert in the abbey church at the end of April. Last year it was the headliner at the International Choral Festival in Sydney, Australia. The choir has performed with the Minnesota Orchestra and several other orchestras here and abroad. Garrison Keillor has welcomed the choir to his Prairie Home Companion. We were pleased to welcome them to our home, especially pleased because the day before there had been such a heavy snowfall that roads were closed and events were cancelled throughout eastern South Dakota. By the next afternoon, the snowing had ceased and the roads were open and dry. A good audience was able to be on hand for the concert. This was the second time that the Minnesota Boychoir performed here under the direction of Mark Johnson. The accompanist for the group is Todd Price who was raised down the road in Milbank and throughout his high school years took organ lessons from our Father Christopher.

 Waiting for their supper for which they didn’t have

 to sing. But when they sang, how marvelous it was!

   The previous month, Huw Williams, the organist at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, performed a stunning recital on our church’s pipe organ. He has played for many national events in England and was the organist at Queen Elizabeth’s Golden Jubilee celebration. Soon he will be leaving England to take up the position of Director of Music at the Church of the Redeemer in Philadelphia. He is well acquainted with the United States, having performed concerts throughout it. In casual conversation with guests and monks, he recalled being served a breakfast waffle in the shape of the state where he had an engagement the evening before. Texas provides a good size waffle.

   In January the participants at the annual weekend Parish Musicians Retreat presented another sterling concert. It was a good winter for music at Blue Cloud Abbey.

HERMANO ROLANDO

      Abbot Thomas has suggested that our priory in Guatemala give us a handout by sending one of the monks from there to help their brothers north of the border. Father Carlos was with us for year and now it is Brother Rolando’s turn to live, work, and pray at the motherhouse. He is forty-six years old and has been a member of Resurrection Priory since 1998. In Guatemala, he has charge of the religious goods store. Here at Blue Cloud, Brother Rolando has various jobs. In the picture above he is helping replace windows on the east side of the monastery. Although he is living away from his homeland for a year, there is still plenty of opportunity to speak his native language. A Sunday Mass is offered here once a month by Abbot Thomas for Spanish-speaking people in the neighborhood. Brother Rolando assists with this and is holding religious instructions in Spanish every week. He came to this country with some knowledge of English and is learning more from Father Michael while getting Abbot Thomas to brush up on his Spanish.

   Associate Duane Bachand (on the left) is also helping Brother Paul and Howard LaMee install the new windows. Duane is no stranger to the Benedictines. His brother is a monk at Assumption Abbey in North Dakota. Duane is able to speak Spanish with both monks on the window crew. He worked at an orphanage in Mexico for seventeen years, almost as long as Brother Paul was assigned to Guatemala. There is one other monk among us in Dakota who speaks Spanish. Father Odilo, while in Guatemala, was the pastor of San Marcos. He recently celebrated his ninetieth birthday. This makes him the oldest member of our community. In August, Father Cletus, who has been stationed in Guatemala since 1981, will reach the same age.

Monks and youth rallying at Resurrection Priory in  Coban, Guatemala

                                                                   Matt Blum

   Although we had very little snow this past winter,

the temperatures were below zero a good deal of the time. On the first day of spring, we had a snowstorm.

By the end of April, forty-one inches of snow had accumulated. Farmers were delayed getting into their fields. And we had a late planting of our garden.

   The spring Oblate Weekend was cancelled for the first time ever because of snow, ice, and hazardous roads.

BY OUR WORKS WE SHALL BE KNOWN

    Boniface, the English monk who became the patron saint of Germany, wrote from there to Egbert, Bishop of York, requesting that copies of Bede’s work be sent to him. While monks and nuns were leaving England in the eighth century to evangelize the Low Countries and Germany, others stayed home and copied books.

   A few months ago, our community viewed a DVD

about the making of the St. John’s Bible. It is the first commissioned handwritten and illuminated Bible since the invention of the printing press. The monks of St. John’s Abbey and University asked a renowned calligrapher and illuminator, Queen Elizabeth’s scribe, to head the project. Donald Jackson is assisted by several artists and theologians.

   In the Middle Ages book production involved monks who did nothing but prepare parchments and make ink. Other monks were manuscript illuminators and bookbinders. Novices and young boys in the schools were trained to copy books. It was not unusual for a monastery to have twelve monks employed full time in the scriptorium. Sometimes lay assistants had to be hired as copyists.

   There were two methods of reproducing books in those days. A manuscript was dictated to a scribe or pages were removed from a book and given to several copyists, each of whom was responsible for doing a section of the book. Six pages of double columns represented a day’s work. It took a year to copy the Bible. A monk, who had an assignment in the scriptorium until his dying day, might have earned credit for adding forty books to the monastery library. Books were needed for common prayer, for private spiritual reading, and for the students in the monastic schools.

   Before the Benedictines, other monks had earned a reputation for turning out fine books. Today at Trinity College Library in Dublin, people stand in line just to look at one page of the magnificent Book of Kells, the work of Irish monks. In the near future, lines will form in the library of the monks at Collegeville, Minnesota.

   Medieval monks were using their skills in other ways. Not everyone was bookish. Although they were vegetarians, they raised livestock for income. Bees were kept for the honey to sweeten the monastic food and the wax to make candles for the cloister and the church. Sheep provided wool for habits and bed coverings and sheepskin for parchments in the scriptorium. Three English monasteries produced ten to thirteen tons of wool annually. They kept ten thousand sheep. A French abbey had seven thousand pigs. The monks grew rye, barley, and oats, and planted orchards. Farming methods were taught to the people who lived around the monastery. The monastery was not only a center of book learning; it was also an agriculture college.

   In order to get their produce to market, the monks were responsible for laying out road routes, bridge building and repair. Monks originated fairs at which they marketed their own goods and imports.

   And for what else were they known? Their vineyards provided wine for the table and the altar. Even monasteries as far north as England had vineyards. Some of the monastic wines became public domain. Burgundy, Rhine, Moselle—all originated in monasteries. And, of course, so did that fine liqueur, Benedictine. Think of us when you raise your glasses to make a toast.

Silent men were observed about the country, or discovered in the forest, digging, clearing, and building; and other silent men, not seen, were sitting in the cold cloister, tiring their eyes and keeping their attention on the stretch, while they painfully copied and recopied the manuscripts which they had saved. There was no one who contended or cried out, or drew attention to what was going on, but by degrees the woody swamp became a hermitage, a religious house, a farm, an abbey, a village, a seminary, a school of learning and a city.

                                          Cardinal Newman

     in Historical Sketches

JON HASSLER

   “Jon Hassler is a writer good enough to restore your faith in fiction,” said a book reviewer for The New York Times. Jon visited Blue Cloud Abbey for the first time in 1973. He kept coming back every year to spend a week working on the manuscript that was occupying him at the moment. Chapters from practically every one of his novels were written at Blue Cloud Abbey. On an evening near the end of the week, he would read for the monks and guests what he had accomplished during his time with us. Visitors were often surprised to find one of the authors they admired staying in the guest wing at Blue Cloud Abbey.

   Jon died this year on Holy Thursday and was buried from the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis a week later. A few months before his death, he wrote to me that the protagonist of the novel-in-progress had taken “a surprising turn. He’s becoming a monk.” Jon, no longer able to type, had been dictating the novel to his wife Gretchen and Lee Hanley, a long time friend, had been assisting them by transferring it to a CD. Although Jon had a Parkinson-like disease for fifteen years, he wrote every day of his life, even on the morning he was taken to the hospital where he died early the next day. Joseph Plut, another friend of many years and a former teaching colleague at Central Lakes Community College, Brainerd Minnesota remarked, “Whenever I asked how he was feeling, Jon always replied that he was feeling fine. I think how he handled his sickness is really a profile in courage.”

   In 1979, Jon became an Oblate of St. Benedict affiliated with our community. This was before he had become a writer-in-residence at his Benedictine alma mater, Minnesota’s St. John’s University, where he had obtained his undergraduate degree in 1955. He taught there for close to twenty years and upon his retirement was named Regents Professor Emeritus of Fiction. There was another writer-in-residence at St. John’s when Jon arrived back there, J.F. Powers. Both writers often employed Catholic characters in their fiction. One of Jon’s is Miss Agatha McGee. This very prim and proper and opinionated sixth grade teacher at St. Isidore’s School appeared in six of his novels and was portrayed by Angela Lansbury when A Green Journey was made into a film by NBC.

   Jon was a popular teacher as well as a popular writer. He told me of a student who became so engrossed in a literature class that he would stay after class and talk with Jon about the book being studied. The student was not majoring in English, but was moving in that direction as a result of having been in Jon’s class. Some years later, Jon saw the student’s uncle and asked about the young man. The uncle said the boy had broken his parents’ hearts. “They thought he’d become a doctor or a lawyer, but all he wants to be is an English teacher.”

   Jon was very helpful to me in my meager literary career. He provided encouragement and inspiration. When my monastic memoir, The View from a Monastery, was first published, Jon reviewed it for a newspaper. He called the book “A Seven Storey Mountain for the contemporary reader.” A year later the publisher used this statement for a blurb on the paperback edition. A reader reviewing it on amazon.com said that she and Jon Hassler must not have read the same book. I think Jon resorted to hyperbole in making that observation. There is no comparison of my book with Thomas Merton’s.

   Brother Dietrich Reinhart, OSB, president of St. John’s University, made this statement upon Jon’s death, “There is no doubt that Jon was one of this country’s great storytellers—a Minnesota voice whose plots and people, while they came to us from small and out-of-the-way places, spoke to all of us, whatever our life experiences. His themes were not limited by time and place—they were about our struggles with choices between good and evil in their everyday manifestations. Jon showed us that we do have choices, and that they are important, no matter how restricted our realm. And with his loving heart, discerning eye and keen sense of humor, Jon made us laugh while we absorb these serious lessons.”

   Jon kept a journal for many years and in it were references to the times he spent at Blue Cloud Abbey. Here is one entry made while students from Gustavus Adolphus, a Lutheran college in St. Peter, Minnesota, were also here. (For over twenty years, Gustavus students have been coming to the abbey for a weekend Benedictine Experience.)

   “Brother Gene is lecturing the students from Gustavus Adolphus on the monastic life. They are gathered in the lobby down the hall from my room, and I hear his husky voice as he describes the Rule and the ordered day of the monk. It occurs to me that the Benedictines have survived for 1500 years by paying attention to form. Lots of form in their lives. Lots of ordered routine. More than necessary, it might seem to an outsider. But maybe that’s why they’ve endured. Maybe if they’d grown careless about form, the substance would have disintegrated and there would be no abbeys for people like me and the Gustavians to visit.”

   Jon, along with other writers and poets, participated in our annual Blue Cloud Literary Festival for as long as it lasted. He was not the first of them to leave this world, however. Poet, Jay Meek, died last November. We no longer hold the literary festival, but we retain our good memories of it and we will always cherish the friendship of all those creative people who read from their works for us and our neighbors.

Brother Benet Tvedten, OSB