by Marco Pardi, MA, DPS

 In a tract of woods near the small town of Conyers, Georgia, stands an unassuming set of buildings known as the Monastery of the Holy Spirit. The long, tree-lined drive, the idyllic lake, and the eventual sight of the church obscure the background evidence that this is a real, self-supporting community of 50 or more monks. Many are retired priests, and many others have come straight into the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance (also known as the Trappists).

Church at the Trappist monastery near Conyers, Georgia Photo courtesy of R. Viau

 

While there are other monasteries and quasi-monasteries (non-residential religious communities) in the Atlanta, Georgia area, this monastery is unique in its rural, almost medieval, setting. Their seamless totality of living the physical and the spiritual life attracted us, the Lawrenceville metro-Atlanta Friends-of-IANDS (FOI) group, to explore with these religious practitioners the implications of non-bodily existence and its related phenomena. Admittedly, a second factor influencing our choice was the absence of any significant ethnic/cultural hurdle which might have arisen had we wanted to converse with, for example, the nearby Loseling Institute, a member of the Tibetan Buddhist Gelugpa Order

On Sunday afternoon, August 31st, eight regular members of our FOI and one guest met for 90 minutes with three Trappist monks, one acolyte, and two associated laypersons (one of whom was the physician regularly attendant upon monks in the infirmary/ hospice). We met in a conference room in the monastery’s Retreat House.

Retreat House, mostly hidden behind trees, in which the IANDS members and monks held their discussion. Photo courtesy of R. Viau

Although I’d been in phone and e-mail contact with two of the monks, we decided against tape recording this first-time meeting. We also decided that, unless and until the monks assent to the public use of their names, our descriptions of them would use pseudonyms.

The point of this article is not to capture a short, specific discussion among 15 people that occurred over a 90-minute period on a Sunday afternoon. The point, through portraying the nature and flavor of the event, is to encourage readers to reexamine what might be their presumptions (about the dogmatic stance presumed to characterize identifiable religious communities), and to reassess what might be their own resources for spiritual development. Cloistered communities dedicated to the search for and the experience of the dynamic matrix of spirituality and temporal existence exist throughout the world, in many different forms and, ostensibly, attached to many different core values or beliefs. An engaged discussion in a cloister, regardless of one’s sectarian affiliation or lack thereof, might prove pivotal to personal ‘breakthroughs’ many of us seek, even in ways which leave us personally unable to communicate our new insights to others.

Once we were assembled and introduced, I explained the reason for our group’s visit, emphasizing that our FOI had progressed beyond the telling and re-telling of interesting stories and was now seeking the meanings and implications, in a non-sectarian and even secular way, of phenomena we felt to be undeniably real.

Brother Adrian, the 55-year-old administrator of the monastery’s infirmary/hospice, responded enthusiastically that the monks were eager to learn from IANDS: “This is all new to the Catholic Church. The proliferation of undeniable evidence that people have gone into this spiritual realm, even as far as a state we could call death itself, yet have come back to tell of it, is amazing and is totally new to traditional Catholic eschatology.” Brother Adrian went on to cite a variety of books he had read and websites he had visited which, in some cases, were unfamiliar even to the IANDS group. “There’s a new book out by a Catholic author who convincingly tells not only the story of his NDE, but also the story of his awareness of his pre-born state. This is unheard of in Catholic tradition. It’s not that we actively discourage such rhetoric; it’s just that it never even occurs in the first place. And while the book seems to be enjoying