BY AVI SELK – The Dallas Morning New; IRVING, Texas — All about the monastery cell lay scraps of Edmond Brophy and signs of Brother Lawrence.
The quilt sewn up from Aggie patches, below white walls specked by crucifixes.
The photo of a grinning mother, beside the portrait of a dead Hungarian vicar.
And in the center of the room, a monk in a long black robe, bent over a binder full of calculus homework.
Brother Lawrence – once Ed Brophy – is 27. He has two math degrees under his belt and a third in the works. He calls himself a “goal-oriented person.” He calls himself a “nerd.”
But he struggles to explain his calling: the X in the equation that four years ago led him to walk out of Texas A&M University with a master’s in applied mathematics and become a monk in Irving, Texas – in a country where even priests grow fewer.
His red eyebrows furrow. A smile creeps across his red cheeks. He leans back in his chair, looks around the tiny room where he might live the rest of his life and begins:
“I had an inkling of my calling before college. I tried to avoid the question.”
In Ed Brophy’s freshman year of college, his calling was hard to hear above the dorm-room din.
Here was more freedom than he’d ever known. Mixers, drinking games, Aggie football, Aggie baseball, Aggie basketball.
“I enjoyed dorm life,” he says. “Coming home at 2 a.m. And as long as the grades came back fine, it was fine.”
But by his senior year, he was beginning to fear his own “worldliness.” Always, in the back of his mind, was Our Lady of Dallas, the monastery beside his Catholic prep school – and the old monks who had taught him math and Greek and piety. About the time his father gave him a Saab – “a young professional’s car” for his future career in mathematics – Brophy broke up with his girlfriend “because I thought I might be a priest.”
By his graduate year, he was going to Mass every day. His calling had become a clamor.
Brother Lawrence’s cell is a bathroom, a closet, a bookshelf, a desk, a computer and a little bed with a quilt his mother made.
“I remember moving in,” he says. “The scariest part was the finality. I’d been on retreats here before, but to know I’m not going to be driving the Saab home …”
The first thing he did was fix his day planner to the wall. As he looked at his future in 120 dry-erasable squares, all blank, he felt elated.
“I could have stared at a wall for five hours and not been bored,” he says. ‘I was like, ‘I’m here.'”
Providence at work
“I guess it was providential,” Brother Lawrence says. “That’s the most reasonable explanation.”
He is recalling the bicycle tour he and four friends took from Austria to Hungary the summer after he graduated from high school.
He ended up at the ancient abbey of Zirc, near Budapest. White-cloaked monks ushered him into the church, where – “it was beyond coincidence” – his math teacher was presiding over the burial Mass of a Cistercian vicar.
At the time, Ed Brophy knew only vaguely the twined histories of Zirc and Our Lady of Dallas: How half a century ago, amid communist repression, the vicar had sent a handful of his monks to safety in Texas.
Much less could Brophy glean that, five years later, he would lie prostrate before his math teacher, the abbot of Our Lady of Dallas, and in solemn ceremony take the name of the dead vicar – Lawrence.
“As a novice you don’t get out much,” Brother Lawrence says. “You can get a little stir-crazy. You take 20 steps down the hallway to the novice classroom. You take 20 steps back to your room. You go to dinner and you sit next to the same monk you sat next to in your choir stall.
“I went to university for so many years, and now I have a diploma saying, ‘Yes, you did what you were supposed to do.’ It’s a lot more difficult to see progress here.”
In the winter of Brother Lawrence’s novice year, his frustrations exploded – a heated argument with the novice master over some small thing.
“I was furious,” he recalls. “With my Irish temper, I get so upset I can’t talk.”
As he stormed away, his face red, the young monk saw the novice master’s coat hanging on the banister. For a split second, the temptation to throw it down the stairs was overwhelming.
Obedience. Stability. Poverty. Celibacy.
These are the vows that attracted Brother Lawrence to the abbey, that now – even as monastic life has become more rewarding and fraternal in his fourth year – he still struggles with.
“It’s not just the not having sex,” he says of the latter vow. “There’s so many good things about being married. That beautiful woman who’s always in a better mood when she sees you.”
Life is strict for junior brothers, who have yet to take their permanent vows. Brother Lawrence has to ask for permission to buy toothpaste. To see his family.
In August, he will decide whether to renew his temporary vows. If he does, he will have until 2013 to renew them for life.
Will he?
In a week of interviews, Brother Lawrence has rarely grasped for words. He does now.
“You get so caught up in the life,” he says. “You sort of forget: Have I really come to terms or understood what I’m giving up?
“If you asked me last week, I’d say I was very sure. And still, I don’t know.
“It’s what I want to do, what I’d like to do. But right now, I wouldn’t want to put a number to it.”
In the stillness
Brother Lawrence straightens out in his chair, lifts his red eyebrows and smiles.
“You can always delude yourself,” he says, “at least for a short period of time: ‘If I just left, everything I struggle with would disappear.’
“I know I’m going to have struggles. Sometimes I’ll mess up. I want this to be where I struggle.”
At 9:30 p.m., he stops speaking, gets up and leaves his cell. He walks downstairs to the chapel, where the brothers are gathered for the night rosary: 53 Hail Marys, six Our Fathers, five Glory Bes and five Fatima prayers – then silence until morning.
One by one, the monks file back upstairs. Cell doors click shut behind them. But down in the church, Brother Lawrence sits alone in his choir stall, in a pool of artificial light.
He is in his habit. His head is bent over a book of prayers he has yet to memorize. And in the stillness of the church, the only sound is muffled highway traffic.
Originally posted at: http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/04/01/416014/monastery-life-calls-to-young.html
Thank you so very much for sharing this. Brother Lawrence is in my prayers
Lou