By Gretchen Keiser

Behind the tranquil exterior of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, there is a great deal going on.

The Trappist monks – some of whom are the founders of the monastery sent out from Kentucky to Georgia 42 years ago – work in the bakery or greenhouse, design stained glass windows or attend the farm land. These works contribute to the financial upkeep and to the spiritual work that is unfolding in the lives of the monks and the whole community.

The second building is the one more difficult to observe, the building of a spiritual house out of the raw materials of so many different men answering a call that only becomes clear by degrees.

There is an unfinished character to it. Yet what is eternal emerges and many seek to capture it whether in words or in photographs or by coming to the monastery and trying to draw closer to the place and the community.

In the last few years, Victor and Dewey Kramer, who are scholars and also friends of the monastery, have given the monks at Conyers an opportunity to speak for themselves. In a work that they describe as a “labor of love” and an expression of long-standing personal and academic interests, they have compiled two oral histories: one, a history of the founding of the Conyers’ monastery and its development over the last 40 years, and the second, interviews with monks at Conyers, at the monastery of Gethsemani in Kentucky, and others, who knew Thomas Merton, a brother monk more familiar to them as “Father Louis” than as the public author and literary figure.

Dewey Kramer, who is a professor of humanities at DeKalb College, wrote a series of articles in 1984 about the 40^th anniversary of the founding of the Conyers monastery. The articles, which appearing in The Georgia Bulletin that year, talked about the history of the order, about the abbots who had directed the community during its 40 years, and about the relationship between this monastery and the people of north Georgia. The articles proved to be the seed of a book, “Open to the Spirit,” which has just been published and expands her study of the monastery in Conyers.

The oral history of the founding of the monastery came about because of several coincidences. One was Victor Kramer’s interviews with monks about Thomas Merton, which revealed such a depth of recollection about the founding of the Conyers monastery that “they showed we had to do something” to record the history. Another was the support of Dom Augustine Moore, abbot of the monastery for over 25 years until 1983, Dewey Kramer said.

The popularity of oral history in recent years also increases people’s awareness that it is valuable to preserve recollections “in permanent form,” she said.

But the interest also comes from an appreciation of the monastic presence and what it means to the people of Georgia. Dewey Kramer, who acknowledges that she has been deeply attracted to the life of religious communities since her teenage introduction to a Benedictine community, believes that there is a “crying need” for a wider awareness of monastic life in the South. “People need to realize there is such a witness going on,” she said.

The oral history includes interviews with 21 monks, normally discussions that lasted an hour with the conversations being taped and later transcribed exactly as they occurred. The monks had the opportunity to review the transcripts and some editing has taken place, although the interviews remain in the rougher state of free-flowing conversation, rather than in the limitations of polished prose. The oral history on Thomas Merton, conducted by Victor Kramer, professor of English at Georgia State University, involved interviews with 19 people. These primarily are interviews with monks who knew Merton as brother monks, as novice master and teacher; however, there are also interviews with the writer Walker Percy and Robert Giroux, editor of Merton’s works for many years.

The two volumes of oral history, which stand several feet off the floor when stacked on top each other, are meant to be resource material and archival documents, but may spark wider interest because of the subject. Ten copies of each have been made, primarily for use by the monastery and at Merton research centers, but the public would have access to a copy at Georgia State University’s archives, the Kramers said.

In the oral history of the founding of Conyers, questions posed included how the individual men came to the monastery, descriptions of life at Gethsemani and at Conyers, the interaction between the monks and the rural Georgia area, and other topics. When the pioneers who founded the Conyers monastery were asked “how was it different” from Gethsemani, “almost invariably they would talk about this sense of freedom” that emerged at the new foundation, Dewey Kramer said. The hard physical labor of constructing buildings for the new monastery necessitated more conversation, breaking the strict rules of silence, and solid breakfasts were needed rather than ascetic fasts. So began a unique character that continues to mark the monastery, the Kramers believe.

“The monastery and the north Georgia Church grew together,” Dewey Kramer observed. The interviews give “insight” into the development of a monastery particularly open to ecumenical work and to relationships with lay people, she said.

The interviews also give “a lot of information” on the work of the monastery, the hay making, stained glass and music. But a particular aspect that emerged, somewhat unexpectedly, she said, was conversation and insight into vocations. Looking back over them, the interviews were “beautiful on vocations,” so much so that she would like to go back and interview other monks, with questions “directed more specifically to what drew you to this life.”

Asked to speak about this particular area, Dewey Kramer said, “You do find reflected in here the growing awareness of individual vocation. Their understanding of their life matures and grows and expands.”

In the Merton interviews, Victor Kramer was searching for a more personal and private awareness of a man much analyzed and discussed as a writer and public figure. “What I tried to do was to get people to talk about personal anecdotes – the kinds of things that wouldn’t be written down.”

Among them are the recollections of a monk who entered as a novice under Merton’s direction and experienced and recalled him as a dedicated teacher. Another reflected that “what was really important was that he was an ordinary monk. That was his first job. That is probably what he would want to be remembered for,” Victor Kramer said.

Kramer, who has read and studied Merton’s works for over a decade and is the author of a biography, “Thomas Merton, Monk and Artist,” noted that a paradox was at the heart of Merton’s life and also an aspect in the Conyers foundation.

By entering the monastery, “Merton thought he was going to go off and be quiet,” he said. “He ended up writing, but it helped him to be quiet.”

The monks coming from Kentucky to Georgia expected to found a monastery that would be a copy of Gethsemani, he observed. But because of their coming to this particular region, “the monastery out here has evolved differently than they expected.”

In one interview in the oral history, Father Bernard Johnson, the English-speaking Definitor of the Cistercian order, who visits Cistercian monasteries throughout the world, was asked to comment on any unique quality of the monastery at Conyers.

Reading from the text, Victor Kramer said Father Johnson’s answer described the community life as “one of the most tolerant, loving I’ve ever witnessed.” Ascribing the spirit of the monastery in part to that communicated by an abbot to the monks, Father Johnson said in Conyers they “live more than in peace, they live in love.”