American rituals

At the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, a remote abbey on the Chama River in northern New Mexico, some two dozen Benedictine monks begin their days in the dark.

Last winter on a Sunday at 3:30 a.m., a bell called the monks to vigil, the night prayer. Under a clear, starry sky, they silently made their way from their monastic cells to an adobe chapel. Seated in wooden pews, the brothers, mostly in black habit, began to sing the first of 12 psalms. They used the old Gregorian melody, but with English words: “O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.”

The sky was still dark when just before 6 a.m. a second bell rang, calling the monks to morning prayers, hymns. Back in the chapel, now with white hoods over their habit, they sang again. When they began with Psalm 150 – “Praise God in his holy place” – the high windows above the sanctuary changed from black to midnight blue, the first hint of daybreak.

The sun rose over the next hour, illuminating the background of the chapel – the Mesa de las Viejas, whose 150-foot rock walls faded from red to shades of sand and cream in a glowing gradient. Apart from the weak current of the Chama River, a sage-green tributary of the Rio Grande, the canyon was silent.

The setting has been carefully chosen. Rev. Aelred Wall, who founded the monastery in 1964, had scoured the country for a place where he and his brother monks could “return to the springs”—to the peace and solitude necessary for their contemplative vocation. While traveling through New Mexico, he heard about an old ranch house for sale 75 miles northwest of Santa Fe – 115 acres along the Chama, surrounded by national forest.

Father Wall found the property at the end of a 13-mile dirt road. He sent an ecstatic letter to his friends at Mount Savior Monastery in Elmira, NY, poeticizing the river valley and its “great sentinels” of colorful cliffs. “Then came the cathedrals in stone, some Romanesque, some Gothic,” he wrote.

Father Wall bought the farm house. He asked his friend George Nakashima, the master woodworker and architect, to design a chapel.

The chapel is built of adobe in the shape of a Greek cross, with arms of equal length, using clay from the site. From Mexico came hand-carved doors, the bell from an old church in the northern New Mexican village of Questa. The artist Ben Shahn, a friend of Mr. Nakashima, contributed two large stained glass windows. Georgia O’Keeffe, who lived 25 miles away in Abiquiu, served as artistic advisor.

Set against the towering cliffs, the adobe chapel looks otherworldly. The Cistercian monk and writer Thomas Merton, who visited the monastery in 1968, once compared the bell tower to “a watchman looking for something or someone of whom it does not speak”.

Shortly after 9 a.m., the bell rang again for mass. About 20 visitors took their seats in the back of the chapel. Abbot Christian Leisy, in purple robes, walked around the altar, brandishing a censer of smoldering incense. Smoke swirled and billowed in the light as it rose.

A monk read from the Book of Baruch: “Take off your robes of mourning and misery; put on the splendor of glory of God forever.” The second reading was from Paul’s letter to the Philippians. The gospel came from the third chapter of Luke, in which John calls the people of Judea to repent and be baptized and “prepare the way of the Lord.”

Abbot Christian’s homily noted that the first lines of the Gospel set us in history—”the 15th year of Tiberius Caesar’s reign, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea.” Luke, he said, wants us to understand that these events really happened. The passage also reminds that God often surprises. God intervenes in the margins, speaking not through Caesar or Pontius Pilate, but through John—”an unknown, one who lives in the wilderness and eats wild honey and insects.”

Abbot Christian concluded by reading a Jewish folktale by the philosopher Martin Buber. It told of a rabbi Eisik, in Cracow, who dreams three times that someone proposes to him to look for a treasure under a bridge in Prague. The rabbi travels to Prague only to learn that the treasure was at home, buried under his stove.

After Mass, most of the monks retired to private quarters. A rambunctious group from Washington National Cathedral migrated to the gift shop and loaded up with brothers-made wares: goat’s milk soap; scented candles; their latest album of Gregorian chant, “Blessings, Peace, and Harmony.”

Shortly after 11 a.m., the bell rang again and called the monks. As the visitors rode off in a caravan, sending clouds of dust into the blue sky, the brothers walked back to the chapel. — Abby Aguirre