By Rita McInerney

Peace whispers over the fields and through the trees at the monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers. God’s peace overwhelms the souls and senses inside the abbey church.

It is a holy place for the 51 monks who make their home there. Some of them helped to build the community. They are Cistercians, a monastic order in which closeness to God is sought through prayer, manual labor, and contemplation.

In ways often difficult for them to articulate, it is also deeply felt as God’s dwelling place for the pilgrims and tourists who come there to spend an afternoon or a week, the spiritual environment is as welcoming to these visitors as are the monks they encounter.

“God is with us,” (Matthew 1) is the absolute in the abbey church, a worship place of classic inspiration and purity of design. Completed in 1961 after years of backbreaking labor and money shortages by the monks who came first to Conyers in 1944, the edifice is a source of strength and renewal for Catholics and non-Catholics.

Visitors climbing to the high balcony glimpse God’s presence in the sunlight warming white walls and pillars. Light filters through tall windows of blues, pinks and white, splashing pale abstracts around the interior.

Light surrounds the worshiper and draws the eye to the altar awash in golden light; which pours through the large windows of orange and gold glass at the front of the church.

All of the beauty is no accident. The windows were designed to create a spiritual atmosphere, according to Father Augustine Moore, third abbot of Holy Spirit. He served for 26 years after his installation in 1957.

They help to make the church the focus of the monastery complex. The whole has come to be known near and far as a serene statement of Roman Catholicism in rural, non-Catholic Georgia.

It is in the medieval tradition of Cistercians to shun stained glass in their churches and the monks designing the building in Conyers Georgia were agreeable to that.

But St. Bernard of Clairvaux, a Cistercian founder who in his writing stipulated neither tinted nor painted glass was permitted, never endured the heat of a Georgia summer.

Father Methodius Telnack, who joined the monastery in 1948, remembers the visit of an abbot general which brought about an exception to the 12th century ban. The superior’s visit, in the summer of 1952, coincided with a record heat wave.

While the monks were discussing building specifications with him he told them they had to put in stained glass windows.

“It was a matter of controlling heat,” Father Methodius explained. Georgia, he adds, is in the same latitude as the Sahara Desert.

While the monks accepted the stained glass, they didn’t want pictures.

“Cistercians are called the first puritans,” Father Methodius says of the absence of pictorial windows and statues in their churches. The glowing Salve window high above the altar took the place of figures.

Father Methodius has decided views about windows that tell a story with glass. “They don’t bring light into the church.” And often, “People don’t go into the church to pray but to look at the pictures.”

A student of architecture at the Catholic University before entering the monastery, Father Methodius began his work in glass design for the abbey church. When he arrived in 1949, building had been halted. Foundations were in but the money was gone.

In 1952, funds replenished, the monks resumed construction. Father Methodius began applying new knowledge gained with a lot of help from stained glass artisans both local and national. The windows the monks created were in the Cistercian “graisaille” glass. This is clear, white or tinted glass of simple geometric forms used by the monastic order since the Middle Ages.

The window motif, a trapezoidal shape repeated over and over, was inspired by the Salve window. This depicts, in rich red, blue and golden tones, Mary holding the Christ Child and surrounded by the hand of God the Father, and the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. This is the only window in the church designed by an outside artist. It was, like all the others, made by the monks.

The idea of the windows, Father Augustine says, is not to tell a story in figures but to support worship as the Gregorian chant supports word of their prayers.

The effect of the windows, the transforming light they invite into the large nave area, is essentially one of peace. “A lot of non-catholics feel God is there,” Father Augustine believes.

Church dignitaries share the belief. Father Augustine remembers Cardinal Leo Suenens coming to the monastery during his visit to Emory University years ago. “He stopped - almost transfixed - on entering the church. Cardinal (Humberto) Medeiros had the same experience.” The Boston cardinal confided that he had always felt a desire to join a monastery.

“I would like to see all churches like ours,” Father Augustine said in sharing his “big gripe about how they handle the Blessed Sacrament.” At the monastery the Eucharist response in the tabernacle niche behind the altar and the lit Sanctuary lamp hangs low before the altar. During mass, the gold curtains on either side of the niche are closed.

The lack of silence in churches today pains him. “The spirit of silence” at the monastery pleases him.

Father Augustine worked silently in the forest while the monastery was being built. He and Father Ephraim cut down the trees for the temporary chapel and then for the scaffoldings required in the raising of the abbey church.

As the building took shape on the hill Father Methodius was among those assigned to pour concrete for the walls and pillars which were to soar to the vaulted ceiling. He claims now he never spilled a batch during the continuous pouring that lasted hours at a time from the high scaffold.

Father Augustine said the monks “had a lot of guardian angels” during the construction. Several accidents occurred, none serious.

Like the other monks, Father Augustine felt the original plan for the church, to duplicate the Gethsemani church from which they came in March, 1944, was wrong for the Conyers site. Father Augustine described the Kentucky church as “A massive pile of brick that looked like a Kentucky distillery.”

Dom Robert, the second abbot, had wanted another Gethesmani in brick, Father Methodius also recalled. Later, the abbot decided he didn’t want as big a church as that they sprang from, and then switched to concrete, when bricks were hard to obtain.

The height as originally planned was 67 feet. That changed when Dom Robert saw the perilous position monks were in on the high scaffolds. Height was lowered to 57 feet and brought a more pleasing proportion to the church.

Father Augustine is among “pioneers” in the Conyers community. Translated, tbis means he came several months after 20 monks, “founders,” arrived from Our Lady of Gethsemani Monastery established in rural Kentucky in 1849.

Some of the neighbors around Honey Creek plantation weren’t too surprised when the monks began their contemplative life on the 1,400 acre property in Rockdale County.

“There was an Indian mound on the property, probably there for thousands of years,” Father Methodius says. “There is something Holy about the place.”

“It’s a very special place ,” he went on to say, “with the wonderful Georgia light. The church just fits in here.”

“No one was surprised when we came,” Father Augustine remembers. “When Father Anthony (the guestmaster) was gathering stories from local people several told him of seeing light over the hill where the church now stands.”

Father Augustine has his own tales from the early years. One came from a Father Farmer, a convert from a local family who became a Jesuit missioner in China. Father Farmer told the monk, soon after the Cistercians arrived, that he had planted a statue of St. Joseph on the grounds with a prayer there would someday be a church on the site.

Another one he likes to tell is about the woman who lived as a small girl on what used to be the south farm on the grounds. As a little girl, she told him, she saw a beautiful; lady floating on a cloud near a pear tree. There was music.

The same vision appeared to her after she was grown and married. Still later when Father Augustine was telling her about Mary, the mother of God, she had sudden recognition. “That’s who it was,” she told the monk of the lady on the cloud.

Another story is humorous. It seems a moonshiner once lived in a house just to the left of where the old monastery was built. He liked to tell his customers that someday there would be a great church on the property.

“He wasn’t wrong either,” commented a former customer when he repeated this anecdote to the monks.

Father Methodius feels helping to build the abbey church was a great privilege for which he is thankful. He chose monastic life after first being attracted to the priest-worker movement which had a brief tenure in France.

He has been in charge of the stained glass workshop from its beginning. The monk artist there put much prayer into every window they create, for a church, home or business. The peace of Holy Spirit is one that he carries with him traveling to other places in pursuit of stained glass assignments, he says.

Father Augustine was a priest of the Louisville diocese before being accepted at Gethsemani. Today, as then, he finds peace and joy in the Cistercian way of living consciously in the presence of God.

“The moments you can spend with Our Lord help the rest of the day go better,” Father Augustine says. He has found that praying the Divine Office in the church and time spent in contemplative prayer are mutually supportive.

He sees the Cistercian quest for God as “an ongoing process. You’re dealing with infinity. Love is that way, never satiated. Infinite love goes on and on.”