Dear Friend of Clear Creek,
In the context of our current Silver Jubilee celebrations, the thought came to me to retrace for those less familiar with our history the main events that led to our coming to Oklahoma in late 1999 in order to establish a new monastery on the banks of Clear Creek.
The first Americans at Fontgombault
Many of you were part of those very early years and will need no reminder of it all, but our younger friends may find the story of some interest. Several people outside the monastery have suggested to me the title “there and back again” (a literary allusion many may recognize) as a way of evoking the “prehistory,” as it were, of our abbey. This corresponds roughly to the years 1975 to 2000.
In fact, the origins of Our Lady of Clear Creek Abbey—at least concerning the American men involved— are of a rather unlikely nature. Outside of Divine Providence, who could have guessed? On the visible plane of human endeavors, this story, begun (of all places) at the state university located on Oread Hill in Lawrence Kansas, was truly a “long shot.” It was at the University of Kansas that three professors: Dennis Quinn, Franklin Nelick, and John Senior, introduced a Great Books curriculum—an “experimental course in tradition” for freshmen and sophomores during a time (the early 1970s) of great social unrest that shook America to its core. These three professors realized that their students were in dire need of help, not merely to “keep up with things and get a job,” but to situate their lives in the best of what has been called Western Civilization, the overarching understanding of the world for which universities in Europe and the Americas were first established. Being often alienated from the world around them, this generation lacked a kind of remedial course in what generations before them had taken for granted: the poetry and wisdom—the great vision—that formed our world.
This letter, however, is not the story of the Integrated Humanities Program at KU from which it sprung, but that of a group of men, who, inspired by this humanities program, sought contact with a more traditional form of monastic life, as it was still lived in France. If you think it surprising that an interest in traditional Christian monastic life should emerge from a Great Books program at a secular university, you are probably right, but somehow a great epiphany took place in the minds and hearts of these students, resulting in a number of them converting to the Roman Catholic Church, during or soon after their time at KU. When a few of these same men—outside the secular classroom, of course—asked John Senior how he thought they could best pursue the quest they had entered upon, he pointed them to the monastic life, to this historic phenomenon largely responsible, in all truth, for the development of what we now call Europe, something that in turn spilled over into the New World.
After an exploratory phase, during which two of these young men traveled around France with the rather far-fetched idea that they could perhaps persuade a French monk to follow them back to Kansas in order to start a monastery—it soon became clear that the only way this great adventure was going to happen was if some of these Americans would simply enter a French monastery and trust to faith. The monastery they finally settled on was an ancient Benedictine abbey, l’Abbaye Notre-Dame de Fontgombault (indeed, quite a mouthful for any American tongue). A group of former students of the IHP program (as well as a few others) tried their luck at this monastic endeavor. Not all of them persevered, but a small nucleus remained and made their monastic professions at Fontgombault. This was no small miracle in itself.
Clear Creek founders and their first postulant
In fact, this French monastic community, unlike most in those years after the great upheaval that followed the Second Vatican Council, was recruiting in a big way. Vocations were pouring in—to the point that Fontgombault Abbey had seriously been considering making a foundation in the United States, where, it was thought, the more primitive, contemplative style of monastic life was sorely needed. Americans, then as now, were enamored of action and had lost sight, perhaps, of some of the fundamental values that had shaped the best of Christian culture. The abbot of Fontgombault rather liked the idea of forming some Americans for ten years or so and then sending them back across the sea to plant a new colony of black monks on American soil. In the end, it took some twenty-five years to accomplish this formation and all the preparations needed for the venture.
During those long years, the two sides of the equation—the ancient monastic wisdom of the monks of Fontgombault on the one hand, and the energy of these young converts brimming over with their vision of things born of great books, “the rarest dream that e’er dull sleep Did mock sad fools withal” (Shakespeare, Pericles, Act 5, scene 1), on the other—came together to create the future community composed both of American and French monks (not to forget several Canadians who joined the group as well). These future founders were initiated into monastic life, worked in the forests surrounding the abbey wearing wooden shoes, and matured in their vocations. Some of them studied Philosophy and Theology, eventually becoming priests.
Finally, beginning in 1991, the abbot of Fontgombault at that time, Dom Antoine Forgeot, together with Father Francis Bethel, one of the Americans, began a series of exploratory trips to various places in the United States, looking for a favorable site for the foundation of a monastery. They visited California, Texas, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, North Carolina, New Jersey, Nebraska, and Kansas, but nothing seemed quite to fit. Then, in September of 1999, largely due to the positive invitation of the late Bishop Edward J. Slattery of Tulsa, Oklahoma, together with the discovery of a large and beautiful piece of property in the hill country east of Tulsa, the thing happened. The adventure that, by the grace of God, had started in America a quarter of a century before and traveled to France brought the students of yore back again to American soil.
In my next letter, I hope to retrace this history in the following quarter of a century (2000 through 2025…), the time of our arrival in America up to the present.
br. Philip Anderson, abbot
