How Mount Angel Mended My Faith
On a Saturday in September I passed several morning joggers as I drove up Mount Angel to the abbey through the thicket of trees that threshold the monastery grounds. I parked and meandered on foot into the theological library with time to spare. A monk led the attendees in a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, after which a visiting priest spoke on the sacredness of reading. The lecture was billed as a feast for book lovers, and after an hour and forty-five minutes I was, surely, stuffed. I pocketed a poem from the handout and ducked out of the auditorium.
I wandered the quad, stopping for a respite on one of the many benches outside. Then I went into the chapel.
Binders were set out on a table near the entrance, open to the next part in the liturgy. Besides one woman sitting near the back, I was alone. Each pew had a foldout bench for kneeling, and the statues and other iconography throughout the nave were foreign to me, a non-Catholic. I found a nook to one side closer to the front and sat down. There I cried.
“By the rivers of Babylon,” it says in Psalm 137, “we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.”
Shortly after I left the chapel, a bell high up in a tower rang, calling the monks, seminarians, and retreatants to midday prayer.
A prayer before the lecture. A bell tower on a quad. I was remembering being a student at BYU, after my LDS mission, when I watched the Tuesday campus devotionals from the auditorium of the Joseph Smith Building (JSB).
My tears released a pent-up longing to unite my past with the present, to entwine my discarded faith with a monastic thread, as if to repair and alter a beloved but unflattering garment that has gathered dust in a closet.
But it’d be easier to give the clothing away. Mormonism has never had a contemplative strain like the Sufism of Islam or the Kabbalah of Judaism, let alone a monastic institution like the Order of Saint Benedict, a 1500-year-old expression of Catholic faith and mysticism.
“The connections that Benedictines painstakingly thread through their everyday lives,” writer Kathleen Norris says, “reinforce my sense of monastic life itself as a great poem, one that honors and celebrates Jesus Christ, who, Oscar Wilde tells us in De Profundis, ‘is the poem God made.’”
If my life, like that of Jesus or Saint Francis, is a poem, then it’s on the verge of the volta, or turn—an intuitive leap from and into the Unknown.