The Abbey in Kalamazoo
"Then for no reason at all he looked up and saw loose branches floating in the air, pebbles whizzing like bullets against the window, and the rain falling upside-down."
Benjamin Samuels is a 19-year-old professional waiter and amateur writer. He is a recent graduate of Deep Springs College, and now lives in New York City, NY.
Just south of Kalamazoo, MI is a small monastery home to six monks. The monastery is named for St. Gregory, an early advocate of monasticism, and follows the thousand-year-old Rule of St. Benedict. The Rule has over a hundred chapters, each regulating a different aspect of monastic life, from meals and clothes to friendship.
St. Gregory’s Abbey follows most of these prescriptions. The monks rise every day at 4:30 for the first prayer, called Matins. They sing three or four psalms together, then go back to sleep for a couple hours, then pray again, then eat breakfast and begin the day. They hold seven prayers in a day at roughly three hour intervals — during which past monks would garden and raise animals.
But now the monastery is aging, and most of the monks are too old for physical work. The livestock is gone and the garden has been abandoned. The woods have been parceled out to various contractors. In their free time, the monks solicit and record the donations that now keep the Abbey alive.
Every year, the Abbey hosts an introductory program for young men considering monkhood. But no one has joined the monastery in decades. It is not clear how many monks the Abbey needs to function. Ultimately, the Abbey will not survive if a handful of young men do not soon feel called to renounce the earthly world — their possessions, their homes, and their families — for the woods outside Kalamazoo.
About a year ago, I was living 2,000 miles west of Michigan, on a cattle ranch just north of Death Valley, sharing a small gray building with twenty other young men and women. Every once in a while we drove an hour out to the nearest town to buy groceries. Otherwise, we cooked, cleaned, and tended to the animals.
What kind of a life was this? It was someone’s fantasy — maybe even mine. Frankly, it was hard to remember what had called me to drop out of high school and come to the desert in the first place. At eighteen years old, my life stretched out ahead of me, and I was struggling to reconcile myself with the idea of attending a university on the East Coast. Did I really want to spend my days in a carrel? Did I want to eat food in a cafeteria, made by mysterious hands? Maybe I would rather herd cows. But ranching is lonely work, and it was beginning to lose its shine. Every morning, with the sun, the Sierras would rise up on all sides, like a great rock prison.
It was around the time of these reflections that the Abbey began to mesmerize me. Both exhausted by and defensive of the years I had devoted to the ranch, the concerted uselessness of the brothers mystified and disgusted me. I obsessed many nights over the Benedictine Rule. The crowning vow, to live and die within a single abbey, transfixed me with fascination and horror, the abbey walls becoming a twisted reflection of my own pale mountains.
I resolved to pay the monks a visit. I figured that at least the route would run through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana — parts of the country I’d never seen before. Perhaps, even if I did not take the vows, this was to be a patriotic, cross-country, coming-of-age road trip of the kind that my grandfather spoke so fondly about.
I had only a few days to make the drive, so I solicited the help of Maccabee, an old friend of mine. He’s somewhat stocky from working in gold mines, where he spends every summer. When he believes that the dignity of a human soul — his or someone else’s — is being threatened, his eyes go wide and he starts performing small, compulsive physical rituals: scratching his chin, rubbing his knees. When we drive by a brothel in eastern Nevada, he starts muttering angrily, shaking his head and groaning, and it takes him all of three hours to settle back down. In these times, he becomes possessed by mute, righteous rage, like a Biblical warrior.
Jacob, another friend from the ranch, was persuaded by the promise of a detour to his hometown in Ohio. Jacob is tall and strong, with beautiful teeth and blonde hair. Like Mac, he has a great love for people. He’s always thrilled to get to know them. He’s got a remarkable facility with words — he talks for as long as you want to talk and grins charmingly the whole time. But on certain occasions, like when he talks about Ohio, a ghostly light illuminates his face, and his smile fades. He turns into himself and grows quiet, doing battle with some anonymous rotation of inner demons. I figure both men will be good companions on my trip to the Abbey.
The drive lasts seventy hours, and we do it in four days. Jacob spends most of the trip at a childish frequency of anxiety, boredom, and anticipation. He waits impatiently for something undefined. I suppose Mac and I do, too. But being older, we pretend to talk about college.
As we set off towards Salt Lake City, the three of us begin to do some calculations. It comes out that if we want any leisure time at all — besides our detour to Ohio — we’ll have to sleep on the road. This is a little tricky, since our van is equipped with a single narrow mattress in the back, set up for one man and maybe an intimate acquaintance. So we mostly drive through the night, sleeping in one or two man shifts.
The unfortunate difficulty with this plan is that the mattress, besides being about a foot too short, is elevated to about the height of the headrests. This means that the person in the back is forced to sprawl out illegally, their feet dangling dangerously near the wheel. Every few hours, a pleasant conversation in the front is interrupted when the van stops or swerves and the man in the back comes sliding feet first into the dashboard, scrabbling for a grip on the headrests. One night, around three a.m., I awake to hear Jacob and Mac debating the possibility of the man in the back going clean through the windshield.
“Like a cannonball,” Jacob murmurs, his foot dancing over the brake.
To varying degrees at different points in the trip, the reverse camera, gas monitor, and transmission are all broken. The van shudders up hills and rattles at stops. The air conditioning doesn’t work and something in the engine is leaky. California environmental law wisely prohibits the registration of jalopies like these. So our plates are bad, too.
Passing through Iowa, we visit the Herbert Hoover Presidential Museum, which offers a strenuous defense of the man whose popular legacy is as the architect of the Great Depression.
“Contrary to what you might have heard,” an introductory video informs us curtly, “Herb was an industrialist and good-hearted humanitarian, caught up in events beyond his and frankly anyone else’s control.”
We decide that this sums up our van just as well as the late president, and resolve to employ it in its defense.
“Fifteen miles an hour — and on a busy interstate, too? Well, contrary to what you might have heard, Officer…”
The van becomes “The Hoover” — for short, “The Hoove.” And the industrious, good-hearted Hoove does manage to take us to many excellent and worthwhile attractions in the stretch of highway between Death Valley and Kalamazoo. On the way there, we visit the Salt Lake Temple in Utah, the holiest site in Mormonism, where gaggles of cute Mormon girls make coy attempts to convert us to the faith. On the way back, we stop at the American Quarter Horse Association Hall of Fame in Amarillo and admire a huge bronze statue of Wimpy, legendary winner of the AQHA’s first blue ribbon. Otherwise, we watch the mountains flatten and rise; the clouds turn white and then gray; the rangeland turn to farmland and back again.
After half an hour or so of driving through the woods in southern Michigan, the Abbey jumps out at us from behind a blind curve which, one night in 1980, sent one of the monks, Brother David, flying off the road and into a tree, rendering him unable to read or sing prayers. When we pull into the parking lot, the Abbey shows no signs of life — even the birds are quiet. Jacob and Mac are wigged out. They wait for my cue to leave.
I poke my head into the chapel, which is empty and dark. I look down a dirt road that leads out of the back of the abbey and into the woods. I scratch my head and look both ways down the highway, for good measure.
But then something clatters on the cobblestones behind me, and I turn to find Brother Armand, my contact, who comes up to about my midsection and wears aviator sunglasses over his grim, jowly bulldog face.
“It’s a pleasure tuh meet yah,” he tells me.
I shake his massive hand and he leads me into the guesthouse, which is built to accommodate maybe twenty visitors and has separate floors for men and women. The monks have made a good-faith effort to keep it clean and well-stocked.
“We got anything you want,” Brother Armand tells me, gesturing at a bookcase stocked with thrillers. “Books. Bawd games…”
But I can’t hear anything else because the Abbey’s bell, hidden in a belfry, starts clanging noisily through the guesthouse. It’s so loud that you can hear it for miles into the woods behind the Abbey. It tolls several times before each of the meals and prayers, for a total of ninety-six times a day. I find the regularity of the bell mighty and severe, until one of the monks informs me that no one has been up in the belfry for decades; the bell is rung by a computer program and its robot arm.
At the sound of the bell, Jacob and Maccabee lose their nerve. They jump back in the van and roar off towards Canton to see Jacob’s family and play pool with the local high schoolers.
Brother Armand directs me to the dining hall. There are two formal meals, prepared every day at noon and six by Father Aelred, who is accurately represented by his name; of all the monks, the black habit suits him best. He has a bald head, massive shoulders, and a long, white beard. I didn’t and I won’t criticize his cooking; I make a point of finishing every one of his meals, except for one especially deep bowl of fermented bamboo.
Every meal, a designated monk reads aloud from a book of his choosing, and during my visit, the reader happens to be the Abbot himself, Abbot Andrew. He peers down at me from his lectern as I assume my seat in the dining room.
Like Father Aelred, Abbot Andrew is a character that you might find in a monastery out of the Asterix comics. He’s very old — in fact, he’s only the Abbey’s second Abbot since its founding eighty years ago. He speaks in a painful, croaky, Yoda-brogue, and he brings a tall glass of water with him up to the lectern, drinking it very slowly in order to avoid reading.
Between the meals and the prayers, the monks clean, cook, and file donations. Theirs is what is known as a contemplative order, though I’m not sure exactly what that means. The Abbey’s library is extensive; it includes three biographies of Charles Darwin and four of Sigmund Freud. And at the back of the library, on a lovely wooden stand, an ancient copy of the Oxford English Dictionary is open to the entry for “contemplation.” So perhaps they’re not so sure themselves.
When I wake up the next morning, I notice that a young man has joined me in the guesthouse, dressed in a black cassock. David, the young man, is deaf. He comes from Virginia and possesses the rare ability to work on steam engines. But steam engines are scarce nowadays, so he makes most of his living from churches that call him in to clean their stained glass windows. To accomplish this, he disassembles their massive windows into hundreds of colored shards and uses special brushes to clean each shard individually, taking care not to chip or otherwise erode the glass. When he is finished cleaning each of the shards, he welds a new metal frame and reassembles the entire piece just as it was. The work requires a steady hand and a calm, attentive eye, and it allows David to spend time in churches, which he finds relaxing. David is using the Abbey’s vocational program to prepare himself for becoming an oblate.
“An oblate is a lot like being a monk,” he explains. “You have to serve God and follow all the rules. But you can get married when you’re an oblate. And you don’t have to stay in the monastery. I thought, well, that sounds pretty good to me.”
During his stay at the Abbey, David is taking classes from Brother Abraham, the second-youngest monk. Brother Abraham is from Texas and has more life in him than all of his brothers combined.
“Lust!” he shouts into David’s hearing aid. “That’s you treating another person like dirt. Why? To get your rocks off!”
Several lay visitors also come and go during my stay. I speak at length with a middle-aged man from Texas, whose wife bought him a plane ticket to Michigan as an anniversary present.
“It was the best present I’ve ever received,” the Texan tells me gravely.
On the whole, there is a funny absence of evangelism in this tiny, aging Abbey. The monks ignore the visitors. The visitors come and go in silence, without even speaking to the monks. I mention this to Brother Armand, who scoffs.
“Oh, you could be Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Hindu. We don’t care. Hey, I was born Jewish!” He waves his hands and looks at me with big eyes.
“That’s very surprising,” I tell him.
“Not everyone has got to become a monk. It happens that the Holy Spirit told me that I’ve gotta be a monk. I got all these signs. So whaddaya want me to do, ignore the Holy Spirit?”
The monks take the Holy Spirit very seriously. All of them believe it was the soft voice of the Holy Spirit, and not external circumstances, that impelled them to join the monastery. So if any of the visitors feel called to save the monastery from its certain extinction in twenty or thirty years, they must be moved to do so by the Holy Spirit, and not by the monks.
The monks and the visitors meet every day for tea before Vespers. They munch patiently on cookies from a red tin box. As a gentle mist settles on the trees outside, Brother Martin tells me that many years ago a tornado came fifty feet from the Abbey, ripping up the trees beside the graveyard. It was the worst storm that had been seen in the county for one hundred years. Absorbed in a book, Brother Martin had sat by the window for hours that night. Then for no reason at all he looked up and saw loose branches floating in the air, pebbles whizzing like bullets against the window, and the rain falling upside-down. So he calmly stood and took his book and read in the basement with the other monks.
The other visitors smile knowingly. I smile right back. I wonder if the role of these places, in the grand design, is as a quiet advertisement to the rest of us: to listen for our calling and then follow its instructions, no matter how unreasonable or strange.
David and I walk together from the guesthouse to the chapel, whose ceiling is stupendously high, held up by curving wooden beams, like the belly of a ship. Two long benches face each other, running down the length of the chapel until the altar. The Abbot and his Prior, Father Aelred, the cook, sit together at the end. When the bell rings, the Abbot taps his gavel and all the monks rise.
And it is a fantastic thing to hear when, late at night or early in the morning, the monks’ voices drop out of a chant and rise together suddenly in beautiful, scripted harmonies. Their six voices become indistinguishable from one another. Brother Abraham’s perfect pitch folds gently around Brother Armand’s wobble — Father Aelred’s smooth, careful murmur blurs with Abbot Andrew’s deep, forceful croak.
After several days, I decide that this is the best, and maybe the only, reason for the Abbey to want more young monks: for despite the choreography, the lovely melodies, and the superior acoustics of the chapel itself, the monks themselves are often missing from the choir. They have to drive each other to doctor’s appointments, go in for groceries, or prepare for the next meal. Sometimes this means that the services near the middle of the day have only three monks. The left side of the chapel has only one singer. There’s no harmony. Then the monks are just people in robes again, and it seems that the presence of God is dwelling somewhere else.
I spend most of my time at the Abbey wandering the grounds, wondering where all the monks are. I take empty trails through the woods. I row alone around a lovely lake. I run up and down the highway, but I never get very far before the bell tolls and I have to jog back to the chapel for prayer. I get a little antsy, to be truthful. What kind of a life is this for a young man?
After a few days in the Abbey I start to get desperately restless. In Travels With Charley, John Steinbeck describes a condition that he calls “the itch.” Reading it in my spare time, I believe he diagnosed me exactly:
“The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage… once a bum, always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable.”
I catch myself watching passing cars and the people in them, wondering gloomily at their destinations.
The monks at St. Gregory’s are gracious and efficient hosts, of course. The difficulty is that they have no desire for company. They pass noiselessly down the halls, like ghosts, without even greeting each other. What could the monks be doing all day? What keeps them here? I try to find delicate ways to ask the monks themselves.
“I sure don’t know,” Father William tells me. “But people write books about it. You could ask them.”
Several of the monks at St. Gregory’s have written books. But none of them seem to know either. I ask Abbot Andrew about one episode in the eighties, during which half a dozen monks and novices left all at once. He stares vaguely at me.
“Why did they go? I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
When I ask Brother Abraham, he waits a full minute in silence.
“There is a story among the Zen Buddhists,” he says slowly, “about a monk who walked from abbey to abbey. For his whole life he walked back and forth across the Himalayas. But every time he entered a new abbey, he wrinkled his nose and said, ‘Gosh, it smells like dog poo in here.’ He did this in dozens of abbeys until finally he came to the greatest, most magnificent abbey of them all, on the top of a tall mountain. He opened the doors, wrinkled his nose, and died. Then, when they were preparing him for burial, they took off his robe, and it turned out that it was his shoes that were covered in dog poo.”
Like all of the other monks at the Abbey, Brother Abraham has never thought about leaving. He spends most of his time listening to rock music. He likes Blondie, Jefferson Starship, the B-52s, and the Ramones. During the on-season, he watches IndyCar — the low-tech American version of Europe’s sleek, professional, commercialized Formula 1.
On my last afternoon at the Abbey, I pace outside the chapel, itching all over. I’ve been in the monastery for three days. I offer a prayer to the noisy rumblings and snortings of the Hoove as Mac pulls it around slowly the big bend.
“Shoo-yee!” shouts the Texan gleefully from behind me, and tips a broad Stetson hat towards the van. “I bet it sure as hell stinks in there!”
It sure as hell does. In fact, I can almost smell it through the open window. But I don’t mind, because the Abbey has got a similar smell — the smell of caged men, I think sourly.
The Texan says, “When I was a young man, I took a road trip with a couple of buddies. Coast to coast. We should’ve burned that van by the end. It was really foul. It’d probably have gone up with one match. Hee hee!”
His giggle reminds me of Brother Abraham, who often giggled happily as he explained again to David the thesis of the Benedictine Rule — that curious, healthy, hot-blooded men could live in the same building together for sixty years without losing their minds. And it is thrilling, in a way, they could successfully tame so much of themselves without, as Brother Abraham put it, “plucking each others’ eyes out, or otherwise killing each other.”
Jacob and Mac giggle constantly on the ride home. They are happy to see me, and I’m happy to see them. We do end up seeing the Grand Canyon, where one night a park ranger finally dings The Hoover for its bad plates. In the dark he happens to miss Jacob’s gigantic feet, sprawled out on the dashboard.
“Well, I know I had it coming, I know I can't be free
But those people keep a-movin', and that's what tortures me”
Early on our last morning, with the sun dawning on the gray, crooked Sierras, Mac and I listen to Folsom Prison Blues. Mac is in a bad mood. He gazes sullenly at his feet. Maybe he won’t go to college. Maybe I won’t go to college. Maybe he’ll mine gold in Alaska. Or maybe we’ll both be trapped on the ranch forever.
Suddenly, Mac lifts his chin in the air.
“You know what?” he exclaims. “Johnny Cash has got to wake up. He thinks he deserves to rot in prison. But he doesn’t deserve it at all.”
I point out that Johnny Cash is guilty and sure does have it coming. But Mac scratches his chin and stomps his feet and rubs his knees and grins.
“Come on — don’t we all?”
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Very well written. I am reminded of Merton's "The Seven Story Mountain."
“The Hoove” 😂 I can picture it. Can picture everything. Greatly enjoyed being along for the ride. Highly engaging writing, Ben!