Do Gay Men Make Better Monks?

In this excerpt from his new book Godtalk: Travels in Spiritual America, author Brad Gooch describes his interactions with Trappist brothers at their monastery at Gethsemani.

Brother Lavrans Nielsen was tall, fair, balding and large boned, with a goatee-style moustache and beard, an intense, blue-eyed gaze, and spare, big hands. Born in Brooklyn of Scandinavian background and baptized as Donald Anthony, he'd entered the community in 1957, at age twenty. A self-taught artist, his haunting icons, executed in Greek and Russian styles, now dot the walls of the new guest rooms in small reproductions, so any visitor's memory of Gethsemani is colored by Lavrans's art.

During his time at the monastery he made grand liturgical banners in felt that hung over the abbey altar on feast days; linoleum block prints for community Christmas and Easter cards; woodcuts, engraving, and calligraphy for the new English liturgy texts; and abstract oil paintings in light colors, often multilayered and three-dimensional. In 1970, he exhibited his paintings at the J.B Speed Museum, and in 1975, at the Swearingen-Byck Gallery, both in Louisville. In 1976 Brother Lavrans left the monastery and moved to Atlanta, where he continued to paint in the abstract expressionist style. He died of AIDS in 1991, at age forty.

In a homily entitled "Remembering Lavrans," delivered on August 30, 1991, Father Matthew Kelty recalled Lavrans as following [Thomas] Merton's lead in folding art, contemplation, and a hermit's solitude into the Cistercian vocation: "His assignment one season was to operate the vacuum machine that drew the air from plastic sacks of quartered cheese rounds and sealed them. It was, of course, a monotonous routine that would drive a man like Lavrans into a high state of exasperation.

This went on, for the work had to be done, until he began to break out in large, ugly boils. So a halt was called, and the brother in charge made a bold move and offered a deal to Lavrans. If he would milk cows each morning-—no favorite among city monks-—and do the chores that went with it, he could have his afternoons for his art. Lavrans seized the opportunity. This was the first time any monk had been given official work time for something like art." To work on his paintings, he moved first to a gristmill with the cloister and then to his hermitage outside the cloister built for him by a friend. ...

Continued on page 2: »