There is only one item on Father Charles Kolek`s wish list this Christmas.
Actually, he never has a long one. He took a vow of poverty when he became a Roman Catholic monk 60 years ago, so to him presents are no big deal. But there is one thing he`d like: to make it through the holiday season, which would be a gift, indeed.
A month ago, the doctors told the 83-year-old Kolek that he has leukemia, projecting he had only a few weeks to live.
He would love to prove their timetable wrong, but not for the obvious reasons. Those who live with him at St. Procopius Abbey, on Yackley Avenue in west suburban Lisle, say they have never seen anyone so at peace with the idea of impending death. At a mass shortly after being informed of the prognosis, Kolek used it as the topic of his sermon.
”Abraham received orders from God to leave his family and to go to a land unknown to him. He obeyed and was blessed,” Kolek reminded his confreres, as monks call one another. ”Now I have my orders to leave all those who are dear to me and to go into the great unknown.”
It is, in fact, for his fellow monks that Kolek worries. Christmas is a festive day in a monastery, even more so than in the outside world where the holiday`s message is largely obscured by commercialization. But four times daily, the monks of St. Procopius gather for prayer, chanting psalms and singing hymns appropriate to the season.
On a Christian calendar, December is the time of Advent. A kind of countdown to the Messiah`s coming, it is a solemn period of reflection and repentance. In their prayers during the month, the monks lament mankind`s sins and remind God of humanity`s suffering. While other homes sparkle with Christmas-tree lights and colorful decorations, not a wreath or a garland is to be seen in St. Procopius.
But on Christmas Eve, the monks will scurry about, hastily decorating their monastery`s starkly modern halls and chapels, and the mood of their chanting will suddenly shift the next morning.
Joining their voices in joyful song, the 40 monks at St. Procopius will proclaim that long ago in Bethlehem a child was born destined to redeem mankind.
Kolek hates to think his own passing might distract those alongside of whom he has proclaimed that good news for so many Christmases past.
”I know the Lord has given me more than my fair share of time, for which I thank him, but I`d like just a few days more,” Kolek confides to a visitor. ”I`m concerned that I don`t mess up the monastery`s Christmas liturgy and rob my old friends here of their holiday joy.”
Life in a monastery is light-years distant from the workaday world, and to an outsider the experience at first can be disorienting. Yet the abbey also preserves values increasingly rare in secular society, like a sense of sharing and a concern for the well-being of others.
To be sure, a monk lives by a demanding schedule: Vigils are sung at 5:45 a.m. Vespers, the last service, take place at 7 p.m. In between, some members of the community go off to work at nearby Illinois Benedictine College and Benet Academy high school, institutions the monastery founded. Others have administrative posts at the abbey or help maintain its physical plant.
But a monk is also free from much of the day-to-day stress laymen know. He doesn`t fear being laid off and knows that three meals a day always await him in the refectory, the monastery`s dining hall.
Some years back, the older confreres recall, one of their members became curious about life beyond the monastery`s grounds. They think he may have wanted to see if he could make it on his own.
One day, the fellow in question removed the long black gown topped off by a hood that marks members of the Order of St. Benedict. Then he went to Chicago and found a job at a Loop restaurant, eventually becoming maitre d`. He also got married. Yet for all his apparent success and happiness, memories of his earlier life must have kept recurring. Twenty years later, he showed up at St. Procopius` door, asking to be taken in again.
”He never said why he came back,” recalls Father Paschal Honner, 62.
”But until he died, you could always hear his voice at prayer, just a tiny bit louder than the others, as if trying to make up for lost time.”
Quiet but not somber
Indeed, a peculiar sense of time is central to a contemporary monk`s vocation, as he lives suspended between two ages. Monasticism was a formative institution in the Middle Ages, when lay people too were vitally concerned with salvation, so that even kings sometimes retired to monasteries at the end of their days. But now, when the monks of St. Procopius leave the abbey`s grounds, they encounter a contemporary world in which material possessions, not piety, determine a person`s status.
Indeed, the very architecture of the abbey reflects the kind of psychological time warp in which its inhabitants dwell. On first encounter, it seems an unrelentingly modern structure with walls of common brick and unfinished concrete. Yet walking through its halls and corridors, a visitor is struck by how subtly the work of its architect, the late Edward Dart of Chicago, echoed medieval forms. Passageways seem to double back on each other, like those of a castle designed to confuse invaders. Narrow, dimly lit corridors suddenly give way to the cathedral-size main chapel, where the sunlight that streams through clerestory windows has been aimed to highlight the monks` pews and envelop them in a collective halo.
The community of St. Procopius takes breakfast and supper in silence, since monks are expected to lead a contemplative life, reserving their minds for higher pursuits than idle chit-chat. They use hand signals to direct dishes around the table; running a forefinger across the opposite palm means, ”Hand me the butter, please.”
At the evening meal, however, one member steps up to a lectern to read a chapter from the Rule of St. Benedict. During the course of a year, the community will have heard the whole of that document three times over. Written in the 6th Century for St. Benedict`s original monastery, Montecassino in Italy, it is still the constitution under which Benedictine monasteries are governed.
”Sometimes listening to the Rule, I marvel at how long it has lasted and how far removed from us in time St. Benedict was,” says Abbot Hugh Anderson. ”Other times, his ideas seem so contemporary, I half expect to sit down to supper with us.”
One of the monks once imagined St. Benedict`s image staring at him from the trunk of an oak tree that workers had felled on the monastery`s grounds. So the late Father Vitus Buresh hauled the trunk into the monastery`s carpentry shop. A woodworker, Buresh had no artistic training, but he carved the saint`s likeness at the top of the trunk. Then he ripped away the remaining bark, exposing the imprint of its long, vertical lines on the wood below, which produced the effect of the folds in a monk`s gown. His statue now stands in a small chapel.
”Father Vitus was a very quiet man,” the abbot recalls. ”But when he spoke through his hammer and chisels, he said a whole textbook about St. Benedict.”
In his Rule, St. Benedict defined a monk`s duties as ora et labora: to pray and to work for the good of others. Yet life in St. Procopius is not so somber or so monotonous as the Latin phrase makes it seem. In personality, some monks are retiring, others outgoing. There are even a few gladhanders. After vigils, some like to play a few hands of pinochle. At week`s end there is a TGIF party at which the monks let down their hair, relatively speaking, with popcorn, a rented video and a glass of beer or homemade wine. The abbey`s vineyard is all that remains of farmlands it once owned, but sold when St. Procopius became surrounded by suburban housing developments.
”Well, I`ve got to go to another party,” one monk announced at a recent TGIF bash. A blustery type, he stared at another monk, whose slight speech impediment positions him to serve as the designated straight man for his comedy-minded confreres, a role he cheerfully embraces.
”I thought you were going to hear confessions,” the straight-man monk replied, right on cue.
”What better party than that?” the first monk said. ”Where else am I going to hear such stories? Oh, the things people tell me!”
Getting along
St. Benedict exhorted monks to live in harmony, arguing that a well-ordered monastery is an earthly approximation of heaven`s divine harmony. The word of the monastery`s abbot is virtually law. In church, the monks sit in stony silence until, with a tap of his knuckles on a pew, their abbot starts them to chanting.
Vital questions, though, such as the admission of a new member, are put to a secret vote, each member dropping a marble in the ballot box: a white marble for yes, a black for no, a green for undecided.
”When there`s a majority of black marbles, an issue or candidate is turned down,” Father Zachary Hrisko explains. ”Whence the expression
`blackballed.` ”
At least once in its history, Honner recalls, the abbey was too badly divided to operate as fraternally as St. Benedict would have wanted it to. In the early 1960s, the monks who ran the monastery`s college and high school thought some of their confreres too involved in the life of prayer to get their hands dirty, so to speak, with the nitty-gritty work of keeping the educational institutions going. The latter group returned the compliment, saying their confreres were spending too little time in church.
Word of these squabbles eventually reached Rome, prompting Pope John XXIII to appoint an apostolic administrator to take charge of St. Procopius`
affairs.
”That brought us together again, real quick,” Honner says. ”Nobody liked having an outsider make decisions for us.”
St. Procopius now seems far removed from such disagreements. The very act of coming together, even before the first light of day, to sing God`s praises seems not only to blend the monks` voices but also to smooth over differences of temperament.
From time to time, Honner recalls, he has been sent out to help pastors of parish churches at some distance from the abbey. Each time, he finds himself feeling a little down for having to miss the abbey`s regular periods of prayer.
”Now I teach at the high school and, believe me, having to say vigils after a long day with students can be a real cross to bear,” Honner says.
”But we monks are deputized to pray for the whole church, for people who can`t take the time to. So I try to picture their faces, which gives me the energy to sing out loud and clear.”
Indeed, most of the monks were attracted to their vocations by encountering examples of that ethic of giving. Many started as students at St. Procopius` high school or college, heading for secular careers. Brother (as a monk who chooses not to be ordained a priest is called) Guy Jelinek was a pre- med student from Berwyn.
”Boy, were my parents shocked when I said I wanted to enter the monastery,” recalls Jelinek, 40. ”I`d never seen people work together so selflessly for a common cause as the monks did, whether they were changing the oil in the monastery`s tractor or working in the college president`s office.” Honner`s father, a farm-implement dealer, was so sure his son would follow him into the business that he had his window signs painted: ”A.G. Honner & Son.” The Honners lived in a tiny South Dakota community of Czech immigrants whose priest was an immigrant too. After that priest died, the local bishop tried sending the parish an American-born replacement.
”Bohemians are thrifty folk, who require value for their money,” Honner says. ”So the collection plate started coming back empty. My father would say, `I don`t hear any Czech sermons, I don`t give the church any donations.` ”
Desperate, the bishop appealed to St. Procopius Abbey, which was founded by Czech-speaking monks. The abbot dispatched one of the monks to Honner`s hometown, and the priest was an immediate hit. Not only could he speak the congregation`s language, but, a farm boy himself, he would climb right up onto tractors to help his parishioners with their field work.
”I was just a kid, but that so impressed me, I decided to come to St. Procopius,” Honner says. ”I didn`t really know what a monk was or did. I just felt I had to repay the monastery for what it had done for our town.”
Still hope for vocations
Of course, those kinds of stories are rarer now: Vocations at the abbey, as throughout the church, have declined. The older monks recall when five or six hopefuls, called postulants and novices, would join the community each year. Currently, there is only one novice at St. Procopius, with two more scheduled to enter in January. Two decades ago, the community numbered 140. Now there are 62 monks, including those serving in foreign missions or otherwise posted beyond the monastery itself.
Yet the monks refuse to entertain the possibility of the demise of their way of life. They say you have to put such matters in historical perspective: How many times in the past, they ask, did the church`s prospects seem bleak just before a new era of piety?
Honner points to the abbey`s cemetery, where members of the order are laid to rest and where, on the eve of All Saints` Day, the community comes to recite its prayers at its predecessors` graves. Looking at their headstones, Honner recalls how St. Procopius was founded by monks who came to Chicago in 1885 from St. Vincent`s Abbey in Pennsylvania.
In turn, that abbey was established by monks who had come to America from a monastery in Bavaria, which itself was founded by monks who had crossed the Alps to Germany from St. Benedict`s original monastery more than 1,000 years ago.
”You see how monks have always come forth to carry on the work,” Honner says. ”So I just can`t believe the Almighty would ever let that chain of faith and service be broken.”
