ARTICLES

Monks Don't Move Up

(Editor: the following review ran in the Sheep and Goats column of the San Diego Reader on November 14.)

Prince of Peace Abbey
Denomination: Roman Catholic
Address: 650 Benet Hill Road, Oceanside, 760-430-1305
Year founded: 1958
Abbot: Father Charles

Congregation: 24 monks, many visitors
Staff: 24 monks
Annual budget: $200,000
Singles program: No.
Diversity: White, Hispanic, Asian.
Dress: Dressy.
Services: Mass, Monday through Saturday, 11:00 a.m. Sunday, 10:30 a.m.
Sermon
Content ***
Delivery ***
Liturgy ****
Music
Congregational **
Choir ***
Snacks ***
Architecture ****
Friendliness ****
TOTAL: 3.5 stars

Early last week, when the nation was bickering about politics, and the government was taking more baby steps toward war, I called Father Abbot Charles at Prince of Peace Abbey in Oceanside.

I asked him what was at the center of the abbey's daily life.

"Prayer and praising God," he said.

Father Charles explained that every day he and the abbey's twenty-four monks engage in about six hours of public and private prayer.

"The brothers can of course pray more in their spare time. We encourage an active spiritual life. The Order of Saint Benedict has always emphasized prayer. Saint Benedict taught that everyone can find transcendence, experience the Divine, touch infinity, through prayer. And the more you pray, the more you realize that prayer is less about petitioning God, talking to God, and more about simply listening. The more time you spend listening, the closer you draw to God. I think our motto should be, 'Don't just do something, sit there!'"

Father Charles described a life radically different not only from that of laypeople, but from that of diocesan priests as well.

"In addition to chastity and obedience, we take a vow of poverty, and we live in community. I'm in no way disparaging diocesan priests when I say that when you become a diocesan priest, you tend to move up a little in the social scheme of things. Monks don‚t move up. A monk surrenders his will to the rules of monastic life. He lives with the same people twenty-four-hours a day, seven days a week. He really has to learn how to love and how to forgive."

Last Friday morning when I drove to Oceanside, thick mist obscured the freeway. Drivers accelerated toward the cars braking in front of them. As I drove up the long, winding two-lane road to the abbey, freeway nuttiness receded from my mind.

"We're smack dab next to Camp Pendleton," Father Charles had told me. "And we're called, after all, Prince of Peace Abbey."

Eighty or so visitors had navigated nasty roads and freeways to attend the 11:00 a.m. Mass. We passed through hefty teak doors into the nave, a soaring space designed by a Benedictine priest from Mexico City. Huge windows fill the nave's north and west walls. Long, wide, gleaming teak pews fill the nave. Beyond the altar hangs a brilliant ten-foot-square icon of Jesus.

The brothers filed into the church and sat at sleek high-backed seats flanking the sanctuary. (Father Charles later told me that these seats had been crafted in the abbey's own workshop.) The brothers sang much of the liturgy in Gregorian chant. Their plaintive, uninflected voices were as striking as their long, brown, hooded robes. The church's dazzling modernist interior emphasized the brothers' remarkable appearance, their stark apartness from the world at this time.

Brother Ricardo gave the morning's brief homily. He spoke about Luke 16, the parable of the "twisted steward" who squandered his master's property. Brother Ricardo told us that we are like the steward, that we squander God's great love for us.

"We are in complete indebtedness to God. But God doesn't only cancel our debts. No. God paid for our debts with his own life. No debts were cancelled. No debts were reduced. They were all paid off by the one whom the debts offended in the first place."

The crowd, half Hispanic, half Anglo, sat quite still. The brothers' composure, the nave's impressive architecture, the liturgy's solemnity inspired a sense of calm I hadn't experienced in any other church in the county.

After the service, Father Charles treated me to a lunch of tuna fish sandwiches, salad, and lemonade. He told me that the abbey receives no money from the diocese, that it supports itself through its retreat house, which can hold up to thirty-three guests at a time.

"Our weekends are booked solid through 2004."

He took me on a tour of the enormous abbey, including the cloister, the "monks only" area. He showed me the room where the monks eat, on weekdays, in silence. He showed me the brothers' recreation room, its fireplace, chess sets, and pool table. He showed me the abbey's 40,000-volume library. All these places, despite their beauty, were made mostly from cement block, polished teak, a few tiles.

Sixty-seven-year-old Father Charles entered the abbey not long after it was established in 1958. He told me that in all his time there, perhaps only two or three monks had left for secular life. He told me that in recent years, older men have started showing an interest in joining.

"On the one hand, they've lived for decades in the secular world. They know what it's all about, and they want something different. On the other hand, someone who's lived with freedom for so long may have trouble adapting to communal life. It takes a very special sort of person to become a monk."

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