Courtesy photo

Trappist monks pray during a liturgical hour at Assumption Abbey in Ava. Trappists are a contemplative order.

It was during his 1973 visit to Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky that local author William Claassen first experienced the refreshing solitude to be found on monastic retreat, but his favorite monastery is right here in Missouri at Assumption Abbey.

Christmas Eve Mass at the Kentucky abbey was something mysterious to Claassen, with its incense-filled sanctuary and the Gregorian chanting of hooded monks. Claassen’s room at the abbey was bare, save a bed and a crucifix hanging on one wall. And there was the silence.

‘I had found a spiritual community that understood my hunger for periods of silence and solitude.’

— William Claassen  in “Another World:  A Retreat in the Ozarks”

"I knew when I left the abbey that monastic retreats would become an important part of my life, a refuge of sorts," Claassen writes in his new book. "I had found a spiritual community that understood my hunger for periods of silence and solitude, a community that strove for cooperation rather than competition."

Claassen, a native of Newton, Kan., has written two books about the quarter-century he has spent visiting monasteries across the United States and world, and he is currently working on a third. The second book, "Another World: A Retreat in the Ozarks," released this year, grants readers a glimpse of one of the smallest and most remote Trappist monasteries in the country, Assumption Abbey in Ava, about 50 miles east of Springfield.

The monastery was founded in 1950 after a Springfield businessman donated 3,400 rolling Ozark acres to the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance. The order began at the Abbey of Notre Dame de la Grande Trappe in France in 1664 as a reform movement of monks opposed to what was seen as a relaxation of practices in other Cistercian monasteries, Claassen says.

"The rigorous routine, established in the eleventh century by the Roman Catholic Cistercian Order of Monks in Citeaux, France, maintains a daily discipline of prayer, study and manual labor," Claassen writes.

The day at Assumption Abbey begins at 3:30 a.m. when the first bell tolls announcing Vigils, the first of seven liturgical hours during the day. The last is Compline at 7:30 p.m. Visitors to the abbey are allowed to worship with the monks as much as they choose, although a desire for solitude is also respected, Claassen wrote. There is even a silent table in the dining hall.

"Because of the strict silence, we once used a sign language to communicate. It was very similar to the language for the hearing impaired," Claassen quotes Brother Richard in his book.

Trappists are a contemplative order, a meditative religious practice. Although the silence is not absolute - Brother Dominic still tells a joke or two while ushering visitors out of the dining hall after breakfast like a mother hen - Claassen describes it as the context for all the spiritual reflection going on at the abbey. Even the grounds are largely silent and removed from the traffic buzz of populated areas. As Claassen describes his walks around the winter grounds - often blanketed in snow - a reader can sense how his own spirituality seems wrapped in a down of comfort and protection.

"Each retreat day I peel back yet another layer of consciousness and, in so doing, reach a deeper level of awareness and vulnerability," Claassen writes.

Layered between his own spiritual journey and those of fellow visitors during his eight days at the monastery are interviews with then Abbot Cyperian and four other monks, including a hermit, Brother Robert, about life as a Trappist monk.

"There is something about comfortability and normality that stifles the spirit," the hermit Brother Robert tells Claassen. He says this is the reason he lives alone in the woods in a 12-foot-by-14-foot tar-papered shack.

Although not as extreme, Claassen reveals how removing himself to a remote Trappist abbey helps him shake off the worries and distractions of modern life. Raised Presbyterian with Mennonite family members, Claassen was once a Quaker but today subscribes to no single denomination. There are too many similarities between all religions, he says, to feel bound to just one. He has visited Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Hindu, Sufi, Japanese and Buddhist monasteries all over the world, which he details in his first book, "Alone in Community: Journeys into Monastic Life Around the World."

Trappist monasteries are open to people of any faith or none. During his retreat Claassen meets a Baptist minister, a former Hare Krishna, an older gentleman from rural Missouri on his first retreat, nuns and businessmen. All are on a spiritual journey, and this makes for a unique kind of interaction not easily had in the noncloistered world, Claassen writes.

While on retreat, Claassen has a dream where he appears before the Columbia City Council with an interfaith group requesting financial support to start a "house of silence," a nondenominational place where people could make mini-retreats in Columbia.

It was just a dream, Claassen says, but he believes many people desire silence and find it hard to turn off in everyday life. There’s always TV, children to tend, a book to read, laundry to wash, dinner to cook, but it’s hard to find a moment to just be quiet.

It’s the practice of cloistering, of silence, of monks that Claassen sees as the great connector of all the world’s religions. "Each tradition honors that," he says. "Amen!"

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