A Monk's Perspective
Reflections from the Trappist Bindery
Br Todd Koesel made Solem Profession in 2010.
I was thinking about my youth watching Pro wrestling about the tag team combinations how the announcer would always say “at a combined weight of” and some wild number like 680 lbs and this made me think of Joe Ben and Fr. Dismas Irish guys checking in the books Donnelly and Gannon birthdays Oct 3 “coming in at a combined age of 177”
Pope John Paul 2 watching us from the north side of the smasher GUY MUST HAVE BEEN THERE A LONG TIME BECAUSE HE STILL LOOKS REALLY YOUNG AND THE PICTURE MUST BE FROM ONE OF HIS FIRST TRIPS TO USA
Peter Plakut, good Polish boy who grew up on a farm in Minnesota when they still used only horses to do the work is at the end of the assembly line on the ultrabind today. Dude is so simple and so profound one day we’re cleaning up the glue murmuring about the current state of the economy and he says to me ”you think this is bad, you should’ve seen 1936 on the farm.” So today I’m looking at him with his eyebrows that always remind me of the angel on it’s a wonderful life, Clarence I think is his name and I see for the first time the absolute paradox of obedience—this man who’d love to have his fingers rummaging through the dirt on the back forty, digging out weeds or picking some grand sized zucchini stands here every Thursday morning at the end of a 4 man line running the books up a stack for hours on end
Colors fall colors, just looking outside the windows there are reds and yellows and browns and hues of oranges that drift from the trees this time of year….looking at the gorilla racks in the back of the shop the books are lining up for packaging before final shipment ..colors, the spectrum with vertical blues and black and greens and even a funky orange if you like, these books having formed a community for 4 weeks of intense hands on process, now go out to the customers, parting ways each one fully its own color
So I’m marking and measuring some books this morning and Br. dick brings over some Journals of Thoracic Surgery and I ask him about his upcoming back surgery next week and he says “oh, that’s on the back the lumbar, this is thoracic, like the chest, I remember the time my son Chris when he was 4 had to get the hole in his chest fixed and I’d spend hours with him at the hospital, used to kill him (and me) when I eventually had to go home for the night, but I couldn’t stay forever…” Then we share a bit about Chris, seller of huge construction machinery, guy still with a little indentation on his chest and a Dad who still remembers…
Sometimes you just got to get out. Making covers today and the autocase is whirring and buzzing in the background but all my energy is focused on the horizon looking through an old window, clasped with an old iron crank onto the driveway and further over the carport into the darkening sky that is weeping heavily this morning and probably for good reason and further still across the county road you can see the old growth forest that backdrops the chapel and it is our backdrop too but before that I see atop the carport for the first time really that iron rooster standing tall in the rain with the compass beneath showing that I’m standing directly east, directly east of what. They say that chickens die if they go out in the rain but this guy is receiving the tears and even glories in them, brandishing a defiant acceptance.
Br. Gerard , gentle exuberant mystic, here’s a guy who’ll go weeks without a word and then a memory induces an explosion of sorts, about hauling the old bull around the property or cooking for the army on the ground in Korea and it is all right there as if it is happening NOW! So I get up a little courage, you never know what’s going to happen here and ask Gerry if he remembers anything wild happening in the bindery and he says, well, I haven’t been working in here long enough to know many stories but up in the carpenter shop when we were making pews we’d come in every Monday and the sawdust on the floor would be covered in animal tracks, mice for sure and then Gerard goes on his way until 5 minutes later he sneaks over to my workstation and says you know I do some of the deliveries in CA and one time I showed up at Sacramento city college and all there was was a vast gravel parking lot and NOTHING ELSE and I wish that I could tell the story like Gerard because he gets so into it and we’re both standing there looking at a gravel parking lot astonished.
There’s this grey rack that sits right next to the Ultrabind and I have hours to ponder this thing on Thursdays. A couple of notes that are stuck on the side reveal that the thing is deeply engaged in the spiritual life along with us one is a version of the Prayer of St. Francis make me an instrument of your peace… and the other says “It’s gonna get weird” and sometimes I look over there at this rack and all the tools flowing from its shelves, the WD-40, the acetone, the MSDS Safety sheets, the mixed and matched toolboxes, allen wrenches, socket sets two boxes of Band-Aids laying on their sides and the ‘daids flowing out like a peacocks feathers and the dust that has gathered onto all of it and I wonder how much of this stuff ever gets used here but that’s kind of like monks and people in general don’t we just keep stuff laying around because “someday, someday you just might need to use that thing” and it makes me think of the mind and how all this stuff, particular to our specific craft is laying around up there and how we get to look at it all the time and isn’t it just sweet when the stuff is disengaged lying on the rack just there…
The Stamper is a gloried typewriter that heats up to 275 degrees that’s Fahrenheit and built of metal arms geared with suction cups and sliders and a twisting mechanism that moves the cloth in different directions after it has been stamped and the sounds that this pneumatic thing makes are the sounds of forced air: sucking blowing the release of some semi truck air brakes, combined with the moving parts of hydraulic action, whatever kind of sound that might be, but that’s the machine. THE stamper is Br. Albert, born Bernard and been stamping for 40 years or more now but more of a technician than anything else because he’s got to know the machine better than it knows itself and Albert is a curious fellow, trying to throw out an image of being gruff and stubborn and disagreeable when somebody needs to be disagreeable but often times you’ll see this little kid come out of him, pulling a prank on one of us and giggling or cracking a joke that’s all his own style and I’ve heard tell that if you get him in the checkout line at the local Safeway, nobody warms up to the checkout gals like this man…
Where have they gone ….PSU Reed College University of San Francisco Graduate Theological Union Pacific University Multnomah Law Library San Francisco Law Providence Medical St. Vincent’s Hospital Willamette University Oregon State Supreme Court Willamette Law ORP (Oregon Regional Primate) OHSU Pacific Northwest College of Art Gonzaga U Hutchison Cancer Research St. Mary’s College Seattle Children’s Hospital Lewis and Clark College and Law School of course UP and a bunch more but I can’t think of them right now, and a bunch of individuals who bring in a Bible or a thesis or just some old book that is lying around that means something to them and the books themselves are no carbon copy things, some from the 1800’s and some right off the press last month…
Yesterday George, our cook came by the bindery wearing his fashionable hairnet and he asks me, hey can I steal some of those rubber bands, just using them to hold some things together and I said sure and it got me thinking you know all of those books that come through the door , each one of them has a rubber band around it sometimes two, and we’ve got three boxes just full of the things lying behind me and so as George is pulling out a few choice bands I take a closer look Wow rubber bands are unique little skinny ones fat ones long stretched out ones each one of them from a different factory and each one with a particular story to tell “ hey buddy you think that’s impressive, I’ve been hugging this Journal of fine Arts since last Friday…” and it makes me think about us, the boys of Guadalupe, how if you reached your hand into that box and pulled out a handful of rubber bands, how one might be one stretch away from snapping, another long and stretched out and very flexible and another bound up tight as can be, each with a differing story and differing shade of earth and place of birth and how we could be that handful of bands….
Fr. Martinus, joined the house at 17 yrs fresh out of Australia and brought his practical and innovative mind with him. Sometimes I think about God creating Mart and thinking all the while “this one will be my special invention” and since Mart himself was in on that moment he took up the cue and began to invent oh I wish I could have seen his baby crib, but that’s beside the point the other day I took a stroll though his area of the bindery and there is hardly anything that could be termed “factory” there’s the most solid table made out of blocks which doubles or triples in the tasks carried out on it, there’s a row of mini coffee cans screwed to another spot to inventory rubber bands, there’s a binders board filing station whipped up in 20 minutes that has been serving a particular function for years in short the place is incredible, but not so incredible as the man who works there a man who in his free time just picked up the language of Juan Diego so that he could translate the original account of Our Lady of Guadalupe, not to mention the other 6,7 ,8…languages that he dabbles in and the obscure saints that he’s written lives of and his prodigious knowledge of local history and not so local history…an amazing man
This lifted straight from Martinus’ history of the monastery from New Mexico..”One of our Early recruits, Frater Benedict had had in his seminary years some experience in the simple binding of library materials, and while he was still a novice he was encouraged to set up a mini-bindery in one of the little cabins typical of the old Ranch. When the carpenters moved into their new building, the bindery moved into the old bunk house.
The bunkhouse was primitive. There was no running water, and so the long line of choir novices en route to work would stop at the pump house to refill the pails. At times we diluted the glue by stepping out to fetch a handful of snow. Winter heat was provided by a wood-stove at the heart of the long, low building; but lay novices (editors note—back then there were two types of monks, choir and lay brothers) sitting for hours at the windows to stitch the books together, found that while the stove did warm their backs, it did nothing for their feet. These almost froze from the contact with the poorly insulated parts of the wall and floor. We were glad to have electricity, since the windows let in precious little of New Mexico’s famous sunlight—being ever coated with the paper dust filling the air from a primitive grinding machine. Whenever the windows were cleaned, the place became so flooded with light as to be almost unrecognizable.”
, a note on Brother Benedict…Benedict has been in the cemetery now for 40 years having died after a hearty breakfast, just fell over and was gone one morning but he began to learn bookbinding skill at the ripe age of 14 way back in 1905. Before joining us in 1939 at the Valley in Rhode Island and then transferring to Pecos NM on the 1948 foundation, he had an eventful life trying out the Jesuit lay brotherhood for 8 years and then trying out the married life for a few more finally landing as a monk where he was cook for years before striking up the bookbinding exploits down in Pecos. Of course these are just musings from the notes of Martinus but sometimes when a brother has died, somebody will put a picture of him on the bulletin board and my memory of that picture that I’ve seen is the dude had a beard that could be termed none other than sweet, completely orthodox
Fridays, casing in involves 8 guys between the paster and smasher and wiper and final checker and boxer and there is a rhythm to the whole thing that makes you think it’s been going on for years and years the up-down motion of the pasting crew (Chris and Gerard) Fr. Timothy on the smasher Howard wiping down the endsheets or not depending on how he is feeling that day and on to Casey who takes a sloppy wet cloth and washes every cover so the glue is all in its proper place and on to Francis who checks to make sure the cover is actually covering the book that it says it is covering that it is the right color then on to Gerald who runs the books to the proper invoice station on the racks to me who boxes the books and weighs them if they’re going UPS or tags them if they are going by our van and Jose our hired gun who does the triple delivery runs to Portland, Salem, and California…
At the beginning of work today there was a little slack time so I picked up a broom, one of those old straw types that we have back in the corner by the water heater and began to sweep up around my workstation and as I swept the broom hit a flyswatter one of those old wire ones that was hanging from the table and I thought “I’ve been working here for almost 6 years now and never once noticed this flyswatter”
I’ve got this exalted vision of the desk of an executive, probably formed by the many movies that I saw before plunging into this thing that I’m doing now…clean little laptop, a picture of the kids, the bowling team holding up the championship trophy ... monks have more like work spaces this one’s got a bobble head turtle on it that wiggles every time the machine fires into its motion another’s got a half a salamander on the end of what looks like a massive paper clip and still another has a collage of photos of family, medieval monastery ruins, a fine shot of a young Flannery O’Connor you know just for inspiration when the going gets tough and some of the spaces are clean as a whistle, plain and bare and austere but wherever you go in the bindery it seems that no matter which way you turn there is a picture of Our Lady of G pasted onto this machine or onto that desk or silently looking over the table from above
Bent over and bellied up to a cast iron table that’s got this big 4 foot blade on a shaft is our Fr. Francis, the leader of the monks in the bindery, the manager, Frankie, Abuna, monk since 1951 in New Mexico with a mind full of stories to relay from his days on the Yale swim team or teenage exploits as a Minneapolis prep school student I love to watch him work in his navy blue overalls with glue smattered over the chest and belly a belly wrapped with the traditional Trappist fat brown belt with his beeper attached (he doubles as the infirmarian) and those black Velcro tennis shoes with the pools of dust gathering on the tops just the way he is so into it, his tongue pacing across his lower lip like a pendulum nothing else in the world except this book, this one…
Looking at the endsheet of a book this morning I saw this word-SWAG and had to question the brothers just what the heck it means because it was clearly written in Martinusian hand and he is currently in Mexico studying up on Our Lady of Guadalupe and it got me thinking about the words you might see on a book as it flows through the system…swell, stubbing, min notch, no trim, and random slashes to indicate tight margin and it raised the alarm in my noggin about all the peculiar language that a bookbinder must know or not know since I still have no idea what swag means and somebody mentions you’d better get Martinus to give you his dictionary and the thought occurs that my brain is too puny, yes, I believe swag may forever be a mystery to me…
A couple of days ago, one of those mornings where you look outside and the place is totally fogged over but above the fog you can see the bluest of skies after a big rain Br. Damien comes in the bindery takes off his glasses and wipes them of the mist, 87 years old and working everyday 5’ 2 with his boots on a Canuck who saunters over to our workstation and says listen to this, you’ll think this is funny, the Yankees won the world series and it was a Japanese guy who did all the work, 6 RBI didn’t even play in 3 games and they give him the Mvp, a Japanese guy on the Yanks, never would have happened in my day, but that’s just it the world is changing and even the Canadians can’t hold a candle to these guys from E. Europe on the hockey rink…this is the same guy who’ll tell you that at 2 days old the doctors told his mama that he wouldn’t make the week “and here I am 87 years old, I think God is having his fun with me”…
Today, I’m just looking around at all of the men and thinking about love and how hard it is and the burden that we each bring to that table and why just why do our heart strings get so caught up in this of that project it’s all going to be ashes someday anyway but God is asking us to walk this line right now and to see him in it and to understand at ever deepening levels that he is here, that he is the one at work that we just have to show up and believe and hope and love and suffer and he’s going to claim our hearts through all of it…
Monks don’t work late, they work early or way late depending on your humble perspective and sometimes if you’re up in the middle of the night wanting rather to look at the stars instead of sleep and take a 2am stroll there is a good chance that a light will be on in one corner of the bindery certainly if it is Friday when Br. Phil gets going at about that hour or any other random day when Martinus might be found in his corner of the world working away with one of those mini paint rollers in his hand and catching up on the handwork that needs attending while the rest of us are snoozing or checking out the heavens in various ways…
Chrome duct work lacing the ceiling coming from 3 different machines, the grinder, the notcher and the ultrabind it all flows into one final portal the Dusthog a big primer grey thing 8 feet tall with a protrusion about 5 feet up with ample supply of green foam padding hooked on with a generous supply of packing tape so that passersby won’t gouge their foreheads and this little hummer makes a whosshing noise that rocks itself every 12 seconds when it is in action blowing our all of the debris from spines that have just recently been shaved off of books and at the end of a couple of hours of action there is probably 15 gallons of chaff real fine grey and soft…
A massive fir right outside the window a lime green pressed air tank lying flat on its side with a gauge showing 120lbs pressure atop it lying a dust mask, one of those ones you can buy by the hundreds 5 old tattered premium mayonnaise buckets, square ones all filled with new and used glue, 2 bright orange BT Lifter pallet jacks shoved beneath some pallets of buckram cloth and skatewheels, the place is covered with skatewheels that act as the highway system for the books going from one end of the bindery to the other …
Outside there is a FORD backhoe rolling by and taking a closer look there are 3 brothers working on some project that looks like the drainage system??? And it always amazes me the stuff that gets hauled out for a minor job the hoses and extension cords shovels picks maddocks and walking by these three give some sign language equivalent of “get to work” to which one can only respond with a knuckle to the forehead who knows what that means and there are giggles going back and forth and I run across Damien sweeping the halls as he says “those guys giving you a bad time, just give em the thumbs down, that’s what they used to do in the coliseum when they wanted to finish off a guy, cruel world out there…is it really??
Dismas, 84 is scanning Google maps to show me his old monastery in Hong Kong Fr. D, a guy who joined the monastery at 16 a junior in high school and the life has taken him from Valley Falls Rhode Island to Pecos New Mexico to Lafayette OR to Hong Kong and finally back to Oregon whatever happened to the days when the monk joined went behind the wall and you never saw him again, and as we’re looking at Hong Kong D tells me about watching the little boys on the houseboats in the sound 4 years old and wielding massive cleaver half the size of the kid himself and how he was picking up all of the fish and gouging out their eyes with this cleaver because the eyes are how you can tell how old they the fish are and so when they take them to market you can sell them for different prices because now nobody knows how old they are and I’m thinking, yep eyes you can look into a pair and know quite a lot about what that body has been through
ULTRAFLEX PVA Adhesive polyvinyl acetate-polyethylene-dispersion in water just looks like glue to me this stuff comes from Deutschland in big dark blue barrels and is the specific glue which we use for the spines of the books there is another type 53-S which floats in 5 gallon buckets until it is used to put the covers on the actual book and both of these are something of an Elmer’s glue consistency and you might get them mixed up if you’re not a glue expert which I’m finding out our Br. Chris is something of one whose specialty is the hot glue Wisdom which comes in a box and looks like massive blocks of rubber cement and when you heat it up if you’re standing close by it smells like burning metal but the further and further away you get it smells like a rotten fish weird which “when it dries out strings off the Potdevin machine in angel hair style, not what you’re looking for…”
Going into a book once it gets here are many different elements all of the glues from yesterday and endsheets that grace the front and back of the book and flannel which hold the spine together and boards cut to size before being stuck onto buckram that has been stamped with foil not to forget the inlay sturdying up the spine of the buckram and all of this gets stuck onto the backside of the book you’ve sent in
In monastic literature and of course experience there is this rascal of a demon called acedia and his basic suggestion is anything but now so if you’re trying to pray he says go write a note or if you’re out walking he says what about that project you get the idea so if you’re sitting at home and have the couch potato version of this little bugger you might be surfing the channels looking around for something else anything to keep you occupied and if you were to jump to ESPN 2 you might see one of those lumberjack competitions where the guys do all sorts of things like cutting a log with saw with a snowmobile motor on it or running along a log that is floating in the water and you might see two guys each on the end of one of those old school saws going back and forth on a log the antithesis of that whole snowmobile motor thing and one of those guys on the end of that saw might be our Br. Chris, Forestry competition double buck champion from Humboldt State U in the mid 90’s and you might think, dude’s a logger, but after winning the gold medal you and your buddies are sitting around with him drinking a local microbrew and the guy will start talking about Hebrew and Greek declensions and hermeneutics or exegesis and it is then that you see this guy is more than a log slicing machine, he builds websites plays the organ, guitar and covers three major posts in the bindery, a lively spirit…
Looking at one of our industrial size crayons this morning I see that thankfully the thing is non-toxic, just in case I get the munchies and want to be 2 years old again and I’m thinking we use these crayons to put labels on the endsheets so the guys down the line will know just how to handle this book, bind it irregular or slice off the margins less than usual and labeling things comes to mind how in our day and in the day of every human time how a note or description could celebrate the thing at hand make more sublime our understanding of it help us to handle it realistically but how often toxicity rolls around and we get heartburn…
The tiles on the bindery floor are of variant hues reds and grays and tans clearly some intentionally others from a fix it job and there isn’t a one in the house that remains unscuffed without a drip of glue or ingrained gouge from a long time ago and right off the loading dock there is one that is missing and all you can see is the black tile glue with the grooves in it that once held this missing tile in place and it is right in the flow of traffic so a hand card rolling by or pallet jack picking up some glue often times hits this bump in the road…
A big yellow placard reading Caution: pinch points watch your hands a similar sign: pull either latch to lower the hood, a pulley system with intricate thin cable and 7 mini pulleys, 14 allen bolts, an orange plastic coffee mug rigged up years ago to keep balance, transparent yellow flex hose that looks like 4 inch duct but isn’t, a spiral pneumatic hose pitching from the ceiling blue, another one yellow, two orange extension cords dipping from screw hooks in the ceiling, Martinus skinning the spine on some ancient book, Albert raising his eyebrows at Frank in mock questioning, a Boston College Environmental Law Journal, zip ties holding most of it together, and some duct tape sticking to the plastic coffee mug…
The life of a single book in the bindery: received and checked into the system 1 pair of hands, collated to remove any and all of the subscription cards unwanted ads, dog ears 2 marked and measured at a contraption with a long wand and double sensors that make a low grade humming noise 3 to the ultrabind where the book is loaded by 4 gets the spine trimmed off then notched for the glue to hold the spine then on to 5 where the text block of the book gets lined up before hitting the glue bath, to the glue bath over an intricate system of glue rollers, the attachment of the flannel to the spine, a funky little station with an air blowing system so that the glue will only get to its desired destination, to 6 who stacks the books sometimes higher than the rest of us think prudent on a slider which 7 rolls down the line of skatewheels for a day worth of drying, each book separated by a piece of plastic to prevent glue sharing where it isn’t wished then that same afternoon 8 and 9 down stack the books and let them dry over the evening before Phil 10 makes the early morning shift to trim the three edges of the block of text so that next morning 11 can round and back them then on to 12 who cuts the boards for the cover on to 13 who collates again and cuts an inlay for each book making sure that the book indeed got bound the way it was supposed to minor detail and here the mysterious 13 matches up the covers that Albert 14 has stamped in the meantime and they are stacked high for the next week’s process which will be the last where 15 makes the covers in the autocase machine and 16 retrieves them and again matches them with the book block and here is a pause where they just sit for a couple of days, a well deserved break before Friday when we do a little routine called casing in where 17 and 18 glue the books to the covers 19 puts them in a heated smasher to solidify the final product on to 20 who wipes any excess glue from the endsheets and 21 who washes the covers and 22 who does one last check to 23 who runs the books to their order number on the rack to 24 who boxes them for the customer. Whew. Of course, this is the life of a “normal” book, don’t get me started on the oddballs. Over two million books over the years…
Having been put together piecemeal over the years there is a collection of equipment from the old days that doesn’t get used very much but still on occasion will be needed to finish up a job that the new machinery cannot handle..thinking about the smasher which itself is old but has hydraulic elements and a heating unit and right next to it there is sitting the Press a massive cast iron thing that has four bars on the sides and a huge wheel at the top looking like the steering wheel of a tugboat that uses a bolt action plate underneath with blocking and powered by good old human flesh …the new machinery cannot handle the fattest books that we do so we have to engage the press it’s kind of a theme around here that the old stuff may not look as pretty as it used to but when you need a job done, where do you turn???
Three aprons hanging on a post one green two dark gray and one of them has so much dried glue on it that it could stand up on its own, a stainless steel tub with water and three nylon brushes soaking, a big fat overfed grey squirrel flittering by the window, an old cardboard barrel loaded with rolls of leather, do you realize how many kinds of leather they’ve got out there, Francis has recently been working on some journals and he’d been checking the leather markets and you can get pigskin to leopard… an 87 year old forester walking through complete with silver hard hat and 3 rain jackets,
The place is a recycle bin…We’ve got Mayonnaise buckets and Tartar sauce jugs holding glue an old tomato juice can catching the water from a leaky pipe Tillamook ice cream tubs inventorying various gadgets a sliced ripe Olive can with a hammer sticking out of it rags from the wardrobe piling over the side of a metal bin that we use for cleanup cardboard cut up from the wine warehouse that go in between the books when shipping…or maybe it’s just an indication that connectivity underlies everything, yes everything…
Monastic living is primarily about wisdom and wisdom usually flows from the elders down to the youngsters and often times that wisdom is very practical. Today was a feast day and I bumped into a couple of lads in the refectory Donnelly and Farrelly, 93 and 94 respectively and they were heavy on mixing up a fresh batch of Colman’s mustard since the stuff we get in the jug “ain’t spicy enough.” The younger of the two took up the banner of Colman Mustard on the chest to alleviate all ailments when a cold is coming on and having never heard of such absurdities I ventured to pry into the experience of the elder and his response was a hearty concurrence although when you finally take the bag of mustard off of your chest there will always be a big red burn, so hot it is and I’m thinking about this conversation while at dishwashing duties and reflect back to the first time I was at the task and one of the seniors was sharing his tricks and I recalled the deep and fierce murmur a paraphrase ”hey old man, I know how to wash dishes” and it dawned on me how ever since that first time I’ve used his technique and couldn’t get by without it…
The appendage at the backside of the bindery is called the office and the office is reached by a slanting hallway with some windows on the side that overlook a long pipe rack and big blue recycle bins and in the office there are 3 computers and often times 3 men at those computers working away at variant tasks one Br. Gerald is the assistant manager of the bindery who interfaces with the outside world tears into old library books and pays the bills if and when he has the dough to do it and Gerry’s is a typical monastic story rolling along pretty successful in the business world and the big promotion on the table and that empty feeling in the guts and he decides to be a monk and all that business stuff you think would just slide down the tubes but God wastes nothing and G is doing some pretty heavy business stuff here but the Why? question has been answered…
There is an odd sadness about today the kind of sadness that negates sadness the real sadness being one that you feel ones access to vulnerability and joy and caring and openness whereas what is afloat today is the kind which sticks to your bones and is the actual want of deeper vulnerability but somehow you just can’t go there because the pain is too scary and nobody would understand that kind of pain anyway and so we talk about football and try to be funny but there is somebody who knows that kind of pain and he is standing right next to you and he waits for you…
Skirting the backside of the bindery is a row of firs that look like they’ve been there as long as the founders of the house maybe 50-60 years old and sometimes when the day is getting goofy or just simply painful those trees are always standing there as a testament to what we are about here-persistence. They’ve been through the Columbus Day storm 2 feet of snow last winter and wind and rain and sunny days and some grey ones too and that’s kind of what a monk does stands where god has planted him even and especially when changing the channel looks like the very sweetest option so that a deeper reality might be lived and who knows you might just learn to be yourself in the middle of even the darkest day…
Fr. Casey, another of the office guys and the fact that he sits behind a computer all morning is evidence that the supernatural is at work here since he’d rather do things the old fashioned way-snail mail, write things by hand and Case has been with us since 1989 after quite a few years as a Jesuit serving most intensely in Nepal and still loving those people as if he flew home yesterday and C is also the novice master which equates to something like marriage counseling for a man in his first 3 years of the ordeal and so us younger ones have spent many a day with him walling through the woods discussing the life and looking at how we are living it and it just might happen that a young brother when unloading on Casey his grand plans for a very austere Lenten observance of fasting and spiritual exercises and and, Casey might reply with a simple “what’s it have to do with love?” and then look at you with that gentle smile of his and your plans funnel down the toilet where they belong…
Bumping, hissing, slapping, hammering, sawing, thwacking, buzzing, hrumphing, blasting, all these sorts of sounds can be heard simultaneously when the machinery gets cooking and each one makes a very distinct tone and rhythm so that one of us who had been working in there for a number of years could walk through the place and give a description of which instruments are playing and who’s in tune and whatever key the thing is making must be minor for sure but somehow it is a lovely combo that becomes part of the rhythm of us and beneath it always is the silence between the notes and that give the notes their flavor..
Each year on the 12th of December we have a big party celebrating Guadalupe Day celebrating our mother celebrating our life here in Yamhill county and this year there was danger of freezing rain that morning so lots of the people who were going to come had to back out at the last minute and there were still probably 200 people jammed into our little refectory and today is the 18th and I think that a BUG flew in on Guadalupe because half of the brothers are walking around here with drippy noses and watery eyes and the other half are waiting of their turn since in community life we share everything and it is one of those days that you just have to plow through and see if this bugger will lift a little on the morrow…
Br. Philip is the third man in the office wears a number of hats sub-prior which means he is the third in charge around here if anyone is really in charge around here and mailman lumbering though the bindery these days shortly before Christmas with lots of packages and computer guy doing all of the networking for the abbey and that is some task with 4 businesses and monks who need to occasionally check the web and Phil is an intense personality which is both his grace and difficulty and isn’t that what it’s like for all of us, but with Phil you can visibly see it that the emotions are right there on his sleeve and the grace is that they are momentary realities and since he can’t stuff them like some of us who then get ulcers and things of that nature they move and one minute you’ll see his grimacing face and the next he’s laughing with a brother and that is something that takes a long time to learn how to let your emotions run out of you without running you…
Walked into the bindery last night at around 4 pm and usually we are doing our thing in there in the morning hours and it struck me as so very still not a soul was in there and the light coming from the west was glancing off of all the books on the wheels in such a way that the whole place was filled with light…
Distinct sounds: a bone folder which is a glorified ivory tongue depressor that is operant during cover making this little piece is thrust back and forth on the recently glued cover to make sure that the random glue sticks in the right places and when it hits the buckram just flat and rapidly goes back and forth on it it makes this singing noise that reminds me of the old school rap groups scratching on a record for lyrical underlayment…Somebody turned on the cutter and before the thing gets moving into action it’s got a warm-up sound hard to describe but imagine the thrusters on a mini spacecraft kind of a low pitched wheeze…
Sometimes the question will arise in one’s head “what the heck am I doing here?” and whenever this occurs to me I go back to one of our elder statesmen of the order a retired Belgian abbot Dom Andre Louf who wrote once that the answer to the question “what is a monk?” is a guy who gets up in the morning and asks himself “what is a monk?” and I guess that is what we are doing out here while binding books and chanting psalms and baking fruitcake and caring for one another and the myriad of other activities that monks get into we are just trying to ask ourselves who am I what am I doing here and what is love and trying to respond to them in a way that Jesus lined out for us all pretty human stuff…
Snow on the ground and on the roofs and in the gutters and covering the trees and filling up the old boot that was left out by the water spicket and transforming the place into a winter wonder place that yesterday was just our regular old house with a bunch of dudes doing the same bunch of duties and now it is a white place where a bunch of dudes are doing the same bunch of duties and it is all lovely isn’t it??
+ Br Todd