Local attorney's book chronicles memories of boyhood at Huntsville's Trappist monastery

Courtesy photo/Mike O'Brien

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The cover of Mike O'Brien's soon-to-be-published book evokes many memories for the author, a Salt Lake City attorney.

HUNTSVILLE — Robed figures in the fields gathering pine branches to make a huge Advent wreath – that memory is as fresh today for Mike O’Brien as when he witnessed it more than 40 years ago. Then, the Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity in Huntsville was a refuge for the young boy, who felt adrift and confused after his parents’ divorce. The Trappist monks’ legacy of love lives on in O’Brien’s life and that of his family, and is told in a book to be published in August.

The saga began when O’Brien, his mother and sister stumbled on the monastery one day while out for a drive. Entering the monastery bookstore, the three immediately felt a connection.

 “My mother was looking for a place of safety and serenity for the family” after a difficult divorce, O’Brien recalled recently. “They befriended us; they took me under their wing.”

The monks did more than that. The monastery became O’Brien’s home away from home, his sanctuary and the center of his world for the next decade.

After that initial visit, the little family returned often. O’Brien, in particular, felt drawn to the monastery’s peace. Before long, he was spending as much time as he could there with his new friends, men who somehow helped fill the void left after the divorce caused him to be estranged from his own father. The monks, without any conscious effort to do so, became surrogate fathers to him.

When he was old enough, O’Brien went to work in the monastery’s chicken coop, on the farm and then the bookstore. He labored alongside the monks, coming to know many of them and their stories before heading off to college to pursue a law degree. With a life filled with law, study, work and then a family of his own, he visited less and less over the years, although he never lost touch completely with his old friends.

In 2016, he was jarred to learn that the monastery would be closing; the remaining monks would move to local nursing homes and independent living facilities. As he thought back over the years and what the monastery had meant to him, “My mind was awash with memories about these monks,” he said. “Stories were rattling around in my head, and as a form of therapy I decided I needed to write it down.”

O’Brien enjoyed the process so much, he began The Boy Monk, a weekly blog. Although he loved it, the writing was often hindered by the complicated feelings he had about the Church. Despite his happy youthful  memories, he had grown estranged from the Church, angered by the sex abuse scandal. The scandal had exposed a deep undercurrent of what he saw as complicity by a hierarchy more anxious to cover things up than to provide solace and support to survivors or to attempt any kind of systemic change.

Over the next few years, several of the blog posts were published as articles in this newspaper, the Salt Lake Tribune and the Standard Examiner. Eventually, O’Brien realized that what had started out as a tribute to the monks and the monastery had morphed into something more: a testament to the power of love and one man’s cathartic journey to finding peace amid turmoil.

“I realized as I was writing down memories of these monks to try to keep their memory alive and preserve their history for posterity in the face of the closing of their monastery; that what I was actually doing was reconciling my relationship with the scandal-ridden Church that I was upset about,” he said.

O’Brien decided to combine his many posts, recollections and notes into a book. An associate in his law firm helped connect him with an agent, who found him a publisher, Paraclete Press. His book, Monastery Mornings, will be published in August.

“I had to go backward to go forward in my relationship with the Catholic Church,” O’Brien said of Monastery Mornings. “I did it by going back to remembering this important 10 years of my life, how foundational and helpful it was to me.

“It started out as me writing stories to preserve the memories of the monks, and I ended up documenting my own journey to help me remain in the Church, a faithful Catholic, a little less trusting of the hierarchy, nonetheless recognizing that the Church isn’t about buildings, it’s about love, and ultimately the best story of love in my life was the monks and my mother,” he said.