III. Historical Background

When on St. Benedict's Day, March 21, 1944, twenty Trappist monks arrived in Conyers to found the Monastery of the Holy Spirit, they were bringing to Georgia a tradition begun some 1500 years earlier, when their patron, St. Benedict of Nursia, abandoned the excesses of life in late fifth century Rome and withdrew to the desert to seek God alone.

(#5) A Holy Spirit Monk near the main entrance gate to the cloister

They were also retracing the footsteps of a small group of monks who on Palm Sunday in 1098 set out from their Benedictine monastery to found a "New Monastery" at Citeaux in the forested wilderness of Burgundy and thereby established the Cistercian Order, of which the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers is a direct descendant.

The search for God, common to all human beings, and which normally develops alongside other occupations, is for a monk his sole occupation. He stands apart from the world of ordinary activity; his is the life of contemplation - love of God alone and for His sake. Here are basically two ways to this goal of absolute God-centeredness: either the solitude of the hermit, the eremitical way, or in the company of like-minded others, the cenobitical way.

Monasticism had existed for several thousand years before Christ, especially in Hinduism and Buddhism. But it assumed a completely new character in Christianity where it became an expression of some of the radical dimensions of the Gospel. It appeared in all the various local Churches of the first Christian generations, but it flourished especially in the Egyptian deserts in the third and fourth centuries. In the West in the sixth century, St. Benedict of Nursia wrote a "Rule" that drew upon all the wisdom of the preceding centuries of monastic life, in the East as well as in the West, and gave it a particularly balanced formulation. His document called for a balance of liturgical prayer (mainly psalms - the Opus Dei or Divine Office) manual labor, and private prayer and meditation on scripture (lectio divina ) and thus satisfied the essential human faculties of the spiritual, the intellectual, and the physical. Ora et labora , pray and work, became the watchword, whereby work would be transformed into prayer, prayer into work.

(#6) The Fontenay Cloister in France

In this "school of the Lord's service," the heart would be purified by acts that were the common lot of men; daily work, harmonious living with others, and spiritual reading. The mortification imposed by obedience, humility, and the common life was sought not for its own sake but to make the monk ready for God's action within him, so that his every action would be praise of Him. Benedict definitely stressed the cenobitic aspect of monastic life. The monk seeks his salvation in common with others and through others.

Benedict's community was under the jurisdiction of a leader whose title of "abbot" (father) described the nature of the relationship between leader and follower: the community was to be a family, and the search for God was to be undertaken in, through, and for the monastic family. In keeping with this conception was the commitment to one particular community, the vow of stability, that has ever since been a mainstay of Benedictine tradition.

Other forms of monasticism continued to exist beside the Benedictine variety during the early middle ages. But when in the late eighth century Charlemagne resolved to reform the monasticism by then so prevalent throughout western Europe, he could find no better vehicle to that purpose than the Regula Benedicti and he established it as the norm for all western European monasteries. From that point on, Western European monasticism was also Benedictine monasticism.

THE CISTERCIAN REFORM:
The Cistercian beginning of 1098 was part of a general eleventh century movement toward reform characterized by the desire to break free of worldly entanglements in order to free the soul for the life of contemplation. For what had happened to Benedictine monasticism by that time was the same process that affects all human institutions: a rigorous and enthusiastic beginning leads to success, numbers, wealth, finally complacency. Eleventh century monasticism was not decadent so much as it was wealthy, comfortable, and involved with the world, materially and politically. The eremitical life of the Desert Fathers therefore, more extreme than Benedict's, appeared as an antidote to complexity and involvement, hence the appearance of hermit-based orders such as the Carthusians and the Camaldolese (like the Cistercians, followers of the Benedictine Rule and hence members of the Benedictine family).

The Cistercian Fathers said their program was a return to the absolute observance of the Rule. In fact, they interpreted it somewhat freely and actually deviated from its letter in some points. But whatever they did furthered the life of contemplation and so observed the spirit of the Rule. What they achieved was a synthesis of the eremitical and cenobitical traditions. Their rigorous adherence to silence, to a greater degree than required in the Rule, for instance, was a means of achieving the "desert solitude" essential for the soul's openness to God's action, while simultaneously retaining the cenobitical principle of Benedict's community. Their penance was that common to the race: to eat your bread in the sweat of your brow and to bear one another's burdens. The monk's gift of self to God consisted chiefly in the gift of self to his abbot and his brothers; and he proved his love for God by the love with which he obeyed abbot and brethren and dedicated his body and soul to praise of God, labor, reading, and meditating, as Benedict had originally worked out.

The communal emphasis is seen also in the way in which the "new monasticism" spread. There had been earlier federations of monasteries, most notably that of Cluny (itself a reform monastery in the tenth century) whereby the mother foundation kept control of the daughter houses. But when Citeaux had to send out its own new groups due to the great influx of vocations, the nexus between mother and daughter houses was set down in a "Charter of Charity" which assured the autonomy of the new foundations within a truly familial relationship.

Within fifty years of the founding of Citeaux, the Order numbered 339 houses, and at the greatest extent of the Cistercian growth in the fifteenth century there were more than 700 abbeys of men and 900 of women. Such magnitude, together with a general decline of spiritual fervor, the Reformation, political complications, etc., led to the need for another major reform.

THE TRAPPISTS:
In 1664 Armand de Rancé felt called to reform his abbey of La Trappe in France according to his conception of the original Cistercian life. In a time of relative laxity within European monasticism, he stressed the need for a life of penance, austerity, and expiation. The rigorous austerity and the obviously passionate commitment to God practiced at La Trappe offered a spiritual challenge to de Rancé's era and his reform attracted numerous followers. "Trappist" Cistercian life grew and continued to exist even during the difficult and anti-clerical decades of the nineteenth century. In 1892 the Trappist Observance was constituted as an Order separate from the Cistercians of the Common Observance. And in 1902 they took the name of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (OCSO).

CISTERCIANS IN GEORGIA:
Trappists first came to the American continent to escape the anti-monastic laws of late eighteenth and nineteenth century France. Several foundations were attempted in different parts of the United States and Canada during a period of some decades, with varying success. The foundation which bears most importantly on the history of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit is that established in rural Kentucky in 1849, Our Lady of Gethsemani.

The development of Holy Spirit Monastery, like that of all Trappist houses in the past several decades, reflects the gradual return to the original idea of a contemplative charism. For this reason the name "Cistercians" designates the essence of the Order more precisely than does the popular term "Trappist." Nevertheless, it was de Rancé's spirit that informed the first foundations in the New World, among them the Gethsemani Abbey, Holy Spirit's motherhouse. More than one of the Conyers pioneers, when asked why he chose the Trappists, will reply that he came "Because it was the hardest life to be found in the Church": frequent fasting, hard manual labor, total silence except for communication with one's abbot or novice master - in short, austerity, suffering, expiation.

(#7) The Abbey of Gethsemani (Kentucky)

In spite of, or because of, such austerity, U.S. Trappist vocations experience great increases in the nineteen-thirties and forties, so that by the early forties Gethsemani needed to make a new foundation, the first native American foundation. Several U.S. bishops were eager to have Trappists in their diocese, but Georgia had an advantage.

The brother of a Gethsemani monk, Fr. Kavanaugh, was vice-chancellor and secretary to Bishop O'Hara of the Savannah-Atlanta diocese. When he learned of the proposed foundation during a 1943 retreat at the abbey, he told Bishop O'Hara, who immediately invited the abbot to Georgia and even made contacts about possible sites. A second important advantage for Georgia was the fact that Gethsemani's abbot, Frederic Dunne, had been raised in Florida and Georgia. Dom Frederic did come to Georgia in December, 1943, spent several days looking, finally was shown the Honey Creek plantation near Conyers, property consisting of approximately 1400 acres, some of which were already under cultivation and which included a producing well, some woodland, and a number of farm buildings as well as some sharecroppers' cabins. There was a barn that could serve as living quarters. So the property was bought and became within four months a functioning Trappist monastery.

Dom Frederic's choice of Rockdale County, Georgia, was similar to that of the 1098 Cistercian Founders. It, too, was isolated, a "desert" or "wilderness," although in this case its isolation was symbolical as well as geographical. The abbot deliberately chose a site which was a desert in terms of the Catholic Church. The new foundation would be a witness to the faith in a foreign, perhaps even hostile territory. Years spent in Atlanta had endeared the area to Frederic Dunne, but they had also alerted him to the need for a Catholic presence in rural Georgia.

Departure from Gethsemani came quickly. At a time when communication was still mainly through sign language, most monks were given few details of the undertaking. On the feast of St. Joseph, March 19, 1944, Dom Frederic read a list of the twenty who would depart just two days later, on the feast of St. Benedict. It was Dom Frederic's intent to send the new founders off that evening with no farewells. But two monks who knew of the plans waited outside the refectory, and as the twenty came out they grabbed them and told them to "Hang in there and keep pitching!" Soon others joined in, and finally everyone walked out to the Gate House en masse, to Abbot Frederic's great surprise.