By Dewey Weiss Kramer

When 20 Trappist monks arrived in Conyers on St. Benedict’s Day of 1944 to found the Monastery of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit, they were bringing to Georgia a tradition begun some 1500 years earlier, when St. Benedict of Nursia abandoned the excesses of life in late fifth century Rome and withdrew to the desert to seek God alone. They were also recalling the actions of a small group of monks who on Palm Sunday of the year 1098 set out from their Benedictine monastery to found a “New Monastery” at Citeaux in the forested wilderness of Burgundy and thereby founded the Cistercian order of which Holy Spirit in Conyers is a direct descendant. Like their predecessors centuries earlier, the 20 left Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky and came to Georgia to establish a new life in temporary quarters in a brick barn.

This article is the first of four written to commemorate Holy Spirit’s founding forty years ago this March and to describe and celebrate the Cistercian presence in Georgia. This first installment, by way of introduction and background, addresses the institution of monasticism itself with particular attention to the Cistercian tradition.

Benedictine Monasticism

The history of Christian monasticism started in the Egyptian deserts of the third and fourth centuries and spread rapidly to all parts of Europe. In the sixth century St. Benedict discovered a monasticism that shifted the asceticism of the Desert Fathers to the interior – from the flesh to the will. Extraordinary mortifications were discouraged. The heart could be purified by acts that were the common lot of men – daily work, the petty business of getting along with others. The mortification imposed by obedience, humility, and the common life was sought not for its own sake but to make the monk ready for God’s action within him, so that his every action would be praise of Him. Benedict thus stressed the cenobitic, or communal aspects of monastic life. The monk seeks his salvation in common with others and through others.

Other forms of monasticism existed beside the Benedictine variety during the middle ages. But when in the late eighth century Charlemagne resolved to reform the monasticism by then so prevalent throughout western Europe, he could find no better vehicle of reform than the “Regula Benedicti” and he established it as the norm for all monasteries. From that point on, European monasticism was Benedictine monasticism.

The Cistercian Reform

The Cistercian beginnings of 1098 were part of a general eleventh-century movement toward reform characterized by the desire to break free of worldly entanglements in order to free the soul of the life of contemplation. Contemporary monasticism was not decadent so much as it was wealthy, comfortable, and involved with the world, both materially and politically. The eremitical life of the Desert Fathers therefore, more extreme than Benedict’s, appeared as an antidote to complexity and involvement. The Cistercian Founders said their program was a return to the absolute observance of the Rule. In fact, they interpreted it somewhat freely and actually deviated from its letter in some respects. But whatever they did furthered the life of contemplation and thus observed the Rule’s spirit. Their rigorous adherence to silence, to a greater degree than required in the Rule, for instance, was a means of achieving the “desert solitude” essential for the soul’s openness to God’s action, while simultaneously retaining the cenobitcal principle of Benedict’s community.

Within 50 years of the founding of Citeaux the order numbered 339 houses, and at the greatest extent of Cistercian growth in the fifteenth century there were more than 700 abbeys of men and 900 of women. Such size, together with a general decline of spiritual fervor, the Reformation, and diverse political developments led to the need for another major reform, one which has a direct bearing on the Conyers foundation.

The Trappists

In 1664 Armand de Rance reformed his abbey of La Trappe in France according to his conception of the Cistercian life. Historians of monasticism now recognize that de Rance’s view of the life was not true to the founding spirit. He saw monasticism as a life of penance, austerity, expiation, and he made of La Trappe a training ground for penitential athletes, cutting away every kind of physical and spiritual satisfaction. Whereas the founding fathers had viewed penance as a means to freeing the self for total openness to God’s grace, he saw it as an end in itself.

Cistercians in Georgia

The development of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit, as indeed of all Trappist houses in the past few decades, reflects the gradual return to the original ideal of a contemplative order. For this reason the name Cistercians of the Strict Observance (OCSO) designates the essence of the order more precisely than does the popular term Trappist. Nevertheless it was de Rance’s spirit that informed the first foundations in the New World, among them Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, the motherhouse of Conyers. More than one of the Conyers pioneers, when asked why he chose the Trappists, will reply that he came ‘because it was the hardest life to be found in the Church’ – perpetual fasting, hard manual labor, total silence except for communication with one’s abbot or novice master – in short, austerity, suffering, expiation.

In spite of, or because of, such austerity, U.S. Trappist vocations were on the rise, so that by the early 1940’s Gethsemani needed to make a new foundation. Several U.S. bishops were eager to have Trappists in their diocese, but Georgia had an edge. The brother of a Gethsemani monk was the vice chancellor and secretary to Bishop O’Hara of the Savannah-Atlanta diocese, and when Fr. Kavanaugh learned of the proposed foundation during a 1943 retreat at the abbey he told Bishop O’Hara who immediately invited the abbot the Georgia and made real estate contacts for him. Furthermore, Gethsemani'’ abbot, Frederic Dunne, had been raised in Florida and Georgia. Dom Frederic did come to Georgia in December, 1943, spent several days looking, finally was shown the Honey Creek plantation near Conyers. The property consisted of some 2000 acres, some of which were already under cultivation and had a producing well, some woodland, a number of farm buildings, and some sharecropper cabins. There was a barn that could serve as living quarters. So the property was bought and became within four months a functioning Trappist monastery.

Dom Frederic’s choice of Rockdale County, Georgia, was not unlike that of the 1098 Cistercian Founders. It, too, was isolated, a “desert” or “wilderness,” although in this case its isolation was symbolical as well as geographical. He deliberately chose a site which was a desert in terms of the Catholic Church. The new foundation would be a witness to the faith in a foreign, perhaps even hostile territory. The years spent in Atlanta had no doubt endeared the area to Frederic Dunne; but they had also alerted him to the dearth of Catholic presence in rural Georgia.

Departure from Gethsemani came quickly. In a time when communication was still only through sign language, most monks knew few details of the undertaking. On the feast of St. Joseph, March 19, 1944, Dom Frederic read off a list of the 20 who would depart just two days later, on the Feast of St. Benedict, some eight hundred and fifty years after Citeaux’s founding. It was Dom Frederic’s intent to send the new founders off that evening with no farewells. But two monks who knew of the plans waited outside the refectory, and as the 20 came out they grabbed them and told them to “Hang in there and keep pitching!” Soon others joined in, and finally everyone walked out to the Gate House en masse, to Abbot Frederic’s great surprise.

In retrospect, that breach of the Rule was prophetic. Breach it was (in those days a mortal sin!) in terms of the strict rules of the Trappist order. But how much in keeping with the spirit of fraternal love so important to Benedict and to the founding Fathers. And it would prove a foretaste of the spirit which the 20 Conyers founders would soon be experiencing in the new Georgia “wilderness.”

(Dewey Kramer and her husband, Victor, have been compiling an oral history of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit. Next week: The building.)