Our Lady of Clear Creek

Over the years Oriens has watched with admiration and hope the foundation at Clear Creek, Oklahoma, of a new daughter house belonging to the Benedictine community of Fontgombault in France. An Australian traveler, Alison Hope, recently visited Clear Creek and gave us her impressions.

To fly from Kansas to Oklahoma is to leave behind a chessboard of farms for a rich untended green, wound through with rivers and copses.

Those to whom I mention this impression say that it doesn’t sound much like Oklahoma , the dustbowl of the thirties; but I didn’t see any dust. Into Oklahoma from the east runs a range of mountains called the Ozarks; and murmuring through the west edge of the Ozarks is Clear Creek, a shallow stream winding past a few houses and a monastery which takes its name from the creek, the Benedictine Monastery of Our Lady of Clear Creek.

The monastery surprised me twice: first, the Brittany beauty of its setting; and second, the bare functionality of its buildings. For a church, the monks of Clear Creek endure a steel rectangle, like a large 1970s garage, within which they must steam each summer. The monks have given its interior every affordable splendour, from velvet-curtained confessionals to French candlesticks, but not even the kind medieval face of Our Lady, whose statue gazes patiently over the congregation from an alcove in the right wall, can entirely dispel the ghosts of cobweb and tractors. By the church stands a second shed, recently barred from the public eye by a fence marking the enclosure. One monk, marvelling at the new sense of privacy, remarked that he didn’t know why they had not earlier rolled this stone across the entrance.

Log cabin pioneers

Within the enclosure, a driveway curves away toward a grand log cabin, presently housing the refectory and sleeping quarters. The enclosure grounds hold a smattering of wooden huts, from which male visitors periodically emerge to cluster by the sheepfield for an evening conversation or to move churchwards. Twice a year, on the feasts of Corpus Christi and the Rogation Days, the enclosure gate is opened to allow women through as part of the procession – in honour of Our Lady, one monk remarked to me. Marian feasts run close to the heart of Clear Creek Monastery, whose formal title is Our Lady of the Annunciation of Clear Creek Priory and whose motherhouse is the Abbey of Our Lady of the Assumption of Fontgombault, near Poitiers in France .

It was always with a shade of envy that I watched male visitors troop off to meals with the monks. It is one of the lots of women never to share the experience of dining as part of a monastic community, for the enclosed female orders keep their enclosure not only against males but against any external intrusion. However, the guesthouse set aside for female visitors and families is consolingly comfortable. A two-storey cabin formed of heavy logs and sitting at the base of a dappled Ozark hill, it used to be the caretaker’s home in the days before the monks arrived in 1999, when Clear Creek Monastery was a ranch.

Sketch model of the church and monastery planned for the Benedictine foundation at Clear Creek, Oklahoma.

Like many old houses in country US , the guesthouse has a two-seater swing suspended from the verandah roof. Of all the technology I encountered in America , this was my favourite. No backyard swing or rocking chair has the grace or the 1950s innocence of the two-seater suspended swing.

At night, if you happen (like me) to be a city girl staying at the guesthouse on your own, the Ozarks can seem a little close for comfort. Locals assured me that there are no bears in Oklahoma but, as I lay listening to whatever those animals are that snuffle in the woods outside, I was struck for the first time by the fragility of flyscreens.

Sobered and watchful

In the guesthouse garden is a caravan used to hold overflow when the guesthouse is full. There, the night world seems even closer. From the bed, you can watch the stars glimmer and shift in that northern sky and you may be woken in the early hours, as I was, by the peculiarly eerie sound of a coyote howling in the woods. The dogs guarding the sheep bark sharply in reply and, plunged suddenly into consciousness of the drama lived out each night in the sheepfield opposite, I am reminded of the Compline psalm: be sober and watchful, for your adversary, the devil, circles like a raging lion, seeking whom he may devour. The monks were warned, I was told, not to try keeping sheep in these woods; but with the sheep they brought sheep dogs and so far they have lost no sheep, though some mornings the dogs show in blood the costs of their defence.

In the morning, the dew on the grass and the bounding exultation of lambs in the field opposite defy the eerie dramas of the night. Beneath the sunshine and the distant call of the monastery bell, Clear Creek breathes serenity. The monastery bell, rung twice before each office, is a call to liturgical prayer, the Benedictine raison d’etre. The monks chant Matins and Compline privately but the remaining Hours of the Divine Office are open to all visitors. Lauds (at around 6.15am) is followed by a silent cascade of low Masses. Low Mass at Clear Creek, even more than the conventual or high Mass at 10am , is worth experiencing – your own parish may be able to present a superb high Mass but you are unlikely to witness there nine low Masses unfolding simultaneously. Like Vespers at 5 pm , high Mass is offered with full ceremony every day. A semicircle of five or six choir monks ebbs and flows between the stalls and the centre of the choir to chant the propers. On Sundays after Mass, the congregation mingles outside the church with the Guestmaster and Prior, soaking in sun and conversation or pottering through the monastery shop.

However, this scene will not last beyond another year or two, for the foundations to a permanent church have been laid further down the road. In May this year, the bridge to the new church was finished – a miniature Pont du Gard paved with native stone, arching twice over a tributary of Clear Creek to the site where the future monastery is, as one monk put it, shooting up like a 13 year old.

Just as flat shadows on the ground reflect nothing of the complex integrity of a person, these sketches portray nothing of the reality of life in a monastery. They may even be so far from the truth as to be illusions, like my aerial impressions of a lush forested Oklahoma . They are, nonetheless, what a stranger’s eyes saw - the response not only of a laywoman to a house of Benedictine monks but also of an Australian to the unexpected cloister of the Ozark forests amidst the comfortable burger joints of mid-West America.

Return to Oriens, Summer, 2004

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