The View from a Monastery

The View from a Monastery by Brother Benet Tvedten, is a memoir of life in the Benedictine community at South Dakota's Blue Cloud Abbey. (This abbey was famously described by Kathleen Norris in both Dakota and The Cloister Walk.) Tvedten mines his 40 years at Blue Cloud for colorful stories about the routines, rituals, and leisure activities that have filled his life, and writes an engaging narrative about the liberation he has found in the restrictions of his Benedictine community. The View from a Monastery is perhaps most affecting in its descriptions of Tvetden's discernment of his vocation. Raised Protestant in a small town in North Dakota, Tvetden read Thomas Merton's The Seven-Storey Mountain as a teenager, which put him on the road to conversion--a painful decision for both him and his family. The first time his parents saw him with his head shaved (a requirement at the Abbey), they cried. The first time he had to spend Christmas apart from them, he cried. Most of Tvetden's stories about monastic life, however, are happier ones. He has immense affection and reverence for the foibles and eccentricities of his brothers, such as Father Francis (who raised wild birds in his cell) and Brother Lawrence (who sold bad paintings to unsuspecting tourists). With stories like these, Tvetden gives the lie to the popular notion that monasteries are little patches of sweet bye-and-bye here on earth. Instead, he gives readers reasons to take joy in the flaws of creation. "If you've heard that monks are saints, you've been told a lie," Tvedten writes. "Like everyone else, we're sinners. You may even be scandalized by some of the things that happen in the monastery. If you are running away from yourself, you won't escape here." --Michael Joseph Gross