by Nicolas Diat
Dom Patrick is a realist: “God does not spare monks from disease and suffering. We must go through these trials with a strength that is rooted in our faith. I cannot deny that medications have changed a lot. Pain is not treated in the same way. The process of dying is different. Evolution exists for better and for worse. At Sept-Fons, we want the brothers to die at the abbey. We try to be on good terms with the hospitals and the clinics so that they warn the father infirmarian when the time has come to bring back our own.” He was thinking of Brother Jean-Lazare, who died in this fiftieth year, in December 2016. This monk was suffering from a devastating case of leukemia: “We diagnosed the disease in February, and he died ten months later. During the summer, he had a transplant. For him, this was a step toward getting better. We hoped, prayed, dreamed, but God wanted to reclaim him. The transplant turned against the body and set into motion a series of increasingly painful dysfunctions. After this operation, he was still staying at the Clermont-Ferrand hospital, in a sterile room, with a very strict protocol. Every day, we would visit him, which meant four hours of driving. I saw that his health was showing no sign of improvement. Brother Jean-Lazare did not really understand the reality of his condition. He loved life, and he believed in a remission. But he could see clearly that the treatments were not working. One morning, we learned of his father’s death. He had been going through a difficult time for several months. I asked God to keep him alive until the departure of our brother: ‘My God, if you are good, allow Brother Jean-Lazare to depart before his father.’ We told his doctors that we did not want him to die in the hospital. How could we conceive of a brother leaving alone, surrounded by tubes, in an intensive care unit? The monastery doctor supported our request. I understood that the hospital staff wanted to keep him. They did not want to look like they were giving in; and they decided to send him back to the Moulins hospital, telling us they could do nothing more. His father died on the day of the transfer. After hesitating, we made the decision to tell him. From that moment on, Brother Jean-Lazare understood that his life was hanging by a thread. He accepted the deadline that was approaching. He died three days later. I had asked the Moulins hospital to stop treatment in order to bring him back to the monastery. They understood our request. Brother Jean-Lazare came back at noon on a Friday, and he died on Saturday at five in the evening.”
Dom Patrick also spoke to me about the difficult hours they lived through with Brother Paul, who died at the age of eighty-two in March 2017. Pancreatic cancer carried him away in three months. When Brother Paul understood that the disease was irreversible, he fell into a depression. Then the monk accepted his fate, and he found peace again. Brother Paul was suffering enormously. The doctors began a morphine treatment. But the pain regained the upper hand. The hospital proposed going to a stronger treatment, warning the Father Abbot that there was a great risk that it would hasten the end: “I understood that this was a graceful way of telling us he was going to die as a result of his treatment. A doctor friend strongly advised us not to accept their proposal. He took responsibility for forbidding the chemical cocktail. I requested that Brother Paul return to the abbey. As a result of his treatment, he was already in a slight coma. I have always had the feeling that the dying remain conscious until the end. They are separated from the living only by physical dysfunctions. I do not believe that a man can be totally cut off from the world. I have acquired this certainty after having accompanied so many monks to death. Brother Paul did not stay long in our infirmary. He died three days later. For the first time in my life, I had been confronted with a situation where painkillers could precipitate death. The line is blurred. Can I speak of disguised euthanasia? Without the help of a doctor, would I have understood the proposition that was made to me? The fight against pain can become a way of killing. Forty years ago, we were powerless in the face of pain; today, the problem is the opposite. For us, the most important thing will always be that the brothers are not alone when they depart. I know that our contemporaries often die in great solitude. Of the last five deaths, three brothers left before my eyes. We have been constantly at their side.”
Every day at Sept-Fons, the brothers read the obituaries of the monks who have died at the abbey since the return from exile, in 1845. At the end of lunch, in the refectory, a monk reads them out loud.
Thus, on February 23, the eve of the anniversary of his death, the community honors the memory of Brother Marien Cluzet, a lay brother of Sept-Fons who died in 1904, whose death must have been striking: “Born in Artoire—Creuse—in 1819, entered Sept-Fons in 1854. He was the assistant guestmaster for a long time; he was revered by the guests and his brothers, being for all a model of charity and humility. He died a holy death on the feast of Saint Matthias. On his deathbed, he had been motionless and mute for three days when suddenly he sat up, lifted his eyes and arms smiling, then fell back, breathing his last. Mary, whom he had loved so much and served so well, had just introduced him to heaven. He was eighty-five years old.”
Some departures are simpler, sometimes even marked by lightness. In 1971, Brother Gerard was dying. A lay brother with a very strong personality, the former sacristan of the Bourges cathedral, he had returned to Sept-Fons after several departures. He was in charge of the chicken coop. There, Brother Gerard took care of a famous cat, called Minette. At the approach of his death, Brother Alain, a very pious monk, was charged with accompanying him. He saw that Brother Gerard was in bad shape. He approached and asked him to repeat the invocation: “Jesus, Mary, Joseph, I give you my heart, my spirit, and my life.” Brother Gerard did not respond. He then said to him: “Jesus, Mary, Joseph, assist me on my deathbed.” He still was not responding. Brother Alain was not discouraged: “Jesus, Mary, Joseph, allow me to die in your holy company.” Brother Gerard then cried out: “And what about Minette?”
The Father Abbot of Sept-Fons has accompanied so many brothers that he well knows the expression of men who will soon be leaving: “I am not afraid of being by their side. The face of a monk whose hours are numbered looks like a mask. At the moment when the soul leaves it, the body is transformed. Before death, the features are often tense, unpleasant; then they appear suddenly relaxed, at peace. We notice it all the more when the brother has suffered. The expression is fixed and does not move. Some of the dead are beautiful, and others a little less so.”
When I asked him how God shows himself when a soul leaves the body, Dom Patrick responded as simply as if he were talking to me about an everyday occurrence: “I am never so much aware of the presence of God as at the moment of the death of my brothers. There is a break, a before and an after. We are at the point of the most perfect intersection between God and the living. I am not speaking about a feeling, a perceptible sensation, but of the certainty of faith. Death is the time of the realization of the promises of the faith. Suddenly, life stops. God comes and goes away with our brother. Without God, man is in an utter absurdity. If the end stops in a hole in the ground, life is not worth the trouble.”
When a monk suffers too much, he cannot pray as before. In these moments, a mysterious alchemy is created; the patient is picked up by the flow of the prayers of the other monks. The man who is going to die can no longer row the boat, but he goes forward with his brothers. Others take the oars for him. Can God do without the prayer of the dying? Dom Patrick believes that if we can no longer pray, it is enough to be with God: “Before a monk is caught in the nets of sickness, prayer is the best attitude, the useful wisdom, the only necessity. The last thing that the dying lose is hearing. In a monastery, they hear up until the last second the prayers of their brothers.”
Despair can overtake a dying monk. Suffering causes fatigue. Temperament plays an important role. Anxious brothers often have difficulties in overcoming these barriers. The Father Abbot must take the time to listen to the religious who are fighting against headwinds. Often, two or three words are enough to get things back on an even keel. The day when Brother Paul realized that his cancer would win, he was
discouraged. Dom Patrick went up to see him in the infirmary; the patient was dejected, depressed, sunk in an armchair that seemed immense. Brother Paul began to speak. Just being listened to did him good.
Dom Patrick often thinks of the words of Pierre Cardinal Veuillot on his deathbed, after he had fought a long fight against painful leukemia: “We know how to say beautiful things about suffering. I myself spoke about it with warmth. Tell the priests to say nothing about it: we do not know what it is, and I have cried about it.” In front of a man who is suffering, fine speeches are useless. They can only satisfy the healthy.
Brother Paul needed a discreet presence. He had never been one to vent his feelings. With disease comes a need to speak more, and Dom Patrick was there to listen to him. These warm little conversations were helping him to cross the ford. One night, the day before his death, the old monk said very quietly to the abbot, in his Alsacian wine-grower’s accent: “You are my father, and I have no other father but you.” Dom Patrick pressed his hand and remained close to him.
Man was not made for dying. Resistance in the face of this fated misfortune is always a striking thing.
In 1985, the winter of Father Jérôme was very painful. This great figure of the abbey marked a generation of monks who were nourished by his rigorous and prophetic instruction. For several months, the monks watched him fade away. The day before his death, he had a first heart attack. His breathing was painful. The monks put him on oxygen. But they did not want to take him to the hospital because they knew that the end was imminent. During the night, Father Jérôme was peaceful. Dom Patrick stayed the whole night at his bedside. In the early morning, he had another attack. The monks went to his room to pray. The bottle of oxygen could no longer ease his breathing. He died in a final choking fit. About twenty brothers were around him.
Gently, Dom Patrick told me: “Things happened as we had hoped. How could I envision Father Jérôme falling into a state of dependence? God spared him the humiliation of a bedridden state. His independent and free personality would have made it difficult for him to be reduced to the rank of an impotent old man. Despite the difficulties, his death was an accomplishment and a victory.”
In 1968, Father Jérôme had written in his notebook: “Thanks to you, Lord, my life flows according to a remarkable continuity of trials and forced abandonments, without clearing, almost without clarity. Yet, beneath these troubles, you have all the same succeeded in helping me obtain the two or three goods that I imagined I would reach by daring and success and that arrived quite gently in silence and acceptance. We must dare to say: ‘never mind’ to all human abandonment, in order to be able to say to any divine offering: ‘I take, I am a taker.’ And you have led me, with the most perfect precision, exactly to the place, where, in my most gratuitous ambition, I wanted to go. Not toward sensual or spiritual delights, but to love for you, founded on truth and capable of lasting.”
Tuesday, January 29, 1985; Thursday, December 7, 1989.
Father Jérôme, Brother Théophane. Two unique stories and two beautiful souls who have flown away.
V
Rainy Days
Cîteaux Abbey
On March 21, 1098, under the direction of Abbot Robert, twenty-one monks from Molesmes Abbey arrived at a secluded place. In the heart of the marshy forest of Cîteaux, they wanted to live together in a more authentic way, according to the rule of Saint Benedict. The early stages were difficult. The abbey was distancing itself from the Cluniac order’s extravagance, but it attracted few novices.
In 1113, the hand of God seemed to come to the help of the reformer monks. Etienne Harding, third abbot of Cîteaux, welcomed Bernard de Fontaine, who arrived with some thirty companions wanting to be formed in the monastic life. In 1115, Bernard in turn left to establish the abbey of Clairvaux. The charisma and tenacity of this young man assured the order a rapid growth, and the foundations multiplied. The Cistercian epic was beginning. It would not stop. In 1153, at the death of Saint Bernard, the order of Cîteaux numbered three hundred monasteries of men. By the end of the twelfth century, there were five hundred. . .
When coming to Cîteaux, how can one envision and rediscover the traces of this past glory? On a rainy day in May, I arrived from Dijon to spend a few days in the historic abbey, after having crossed the lush, rich Burgundian countryside. The metallic sky oscillated between gray, black, and violet. Huge clouds were rolling toward the forests of Nuits-Saint-Georges.
In passing through the beautiful gate that opened onto a long drive, I was struck by the austerity, bareness, and gravity of the place. The Cistercians have always cultivated an ascetic detachment; it was normal for the radicality of the place to affect my view.
The monastery is organized around an imposing eighteenth-century building, the Lenoir wing, where the ground floor gallery measures almost 110 yards long. In the gardens, at the center of a perfectly mowed lawn, a giant crucifix stands in front of the building. In the setting sun, it casts its shadow on the white stone of the facade. The monks’ cells occupy the upper floors. Farther on, at the edge of the park, an imposing statue of Saint Bernard completes this intimidating setting. The contrast between the white-water channels and the sunken paths that cut through the undergrowth is striking, evoking a romantic English park.
The church has been completely renovated. Ever since 1998, the nave, the choir, and the aisles form a large, white, bare rectangle. To love this place requires a strong, inner fire.
Opposite, guestrooms occupy a large farmhouse built in the middle of the nineteenth century.
The evening of my arrival, the sky was a dazzling pale blue. After Compline, a distinctive silence reigned. It was pouring rain, and I felt there wasn’t a living soul in these lands of Saint Bernard.
At Cîteaux, more than elsewhere, the presence of the dead is felt. On the other side of the Lenoir wing, the cemetery seemed immeasurable. A hundred graves were arranged around a beautiful stone cross. Unfortunately, the boxwood that decorated them was shriveling from the effects of a destructive parasite.
I went to Cîteaux to meet Father Olivier Quenardel. From the outset, I was struck by the strength, gentleness, and intelligence of his appearance. Born in 1946, he entered Cîteaux at the age of twenty. He was ordained a priest in 1988, then elected Father Abbot in 1993. Today, he is at the head of a community of twenty-s ix monks, four of whom live at Munkeby, a Norwegian foundation. Seven elderly brothers are in the infirmary.
Father Quenardel is a righteous and noble man who knows how to convince the person with whom he is speaking. Quiet, precise, and attentive, he might begin with an outburst of infectious laughter. As a young novice, he knew a different Cîteaux—where monks slept together in a dormitorium, where lay brothers could not be monks, where the Divine Office was in Latin. Since then, it has changed mostly to French, which, for some, was a bit of an ordeal, without, however, causing a crisis of faith.
At the beginning of our conversation, Dom Olivier wanted to tell me about the death of one of his predecessors, Dom Jean Chanut. Born in 1909, he entered the abbey at sixteen. At the other end of the road, in 1980, he died in Congo-Kinshasa, on the feast of the Assumption, after having prayed and sung all day with the African faithful. In the morning, he had celebrated Mass in the Mokoto monastery. Some hours later, accompanied by a villager whose family he had visited, he leaned his head on the shoulder of a young girl, who became a nun some years later. He told her: “It is a very great day today”, and he died. Dom Olivier was moved as he told me about so discreet and beautiful a passing. His predecessor was a man of great faith. He should have died young. The novice master had told him one day when he was seriously ill: “My little child, this evening you will be with the good God.” Dom Jean had seen the hour pass, and death had not come. At midnight, he was still there.
When they wrote a short history of his life, the monks wanted to highlight some of the amazing circumstances: “He crossed the threshold to eternity only after having been at the brink of dea
th three times. He made his temporary profession in August 1928, and, in December, he was diagnosed with fairly advanced Pott’s disease. He stayed in bed for two years and had a bone graft operation that was very successful, but, because of internal hemorrhaging, he was close to death and received Extreme Unction. From 1930 to 1938, he benefited from a little reprieve and spent those years in the effacement of communal life. It was then he would learn to become the beloved confidant of his brothers and a master of prayer. In 1938, his right kidney was lost and the left kidney was beginning to be affected by tuberculosis. He had an emergency operation, but the disease was winning. He would remain four years in complete rest in the infirmary from 1939 to 1943, each test finding traces of tuberculosis. At the initiative of a retreat master, a novena to Sister Elizabeth of the Trinity was made by the community, and, by the end of the novena, all trace of tuberculosis had disappeared. Eight days after the novena, he was riding a bicycle without any special fatigue. This recovery, totally inexplicable on a medical level, was recognized by the Church as a miracle obtained through the intercession of the one who would become Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity. Father Jean came very close to death a third time following an operation, in 1968. He wrote in a statement, addressed to his whole community at the time of his resignation: ‘These health problems have certainly been a source of great grace for me, and, far from complaining, I can in hindsight only humbly thank the Lord. . .’; and, speaking of his abbatial office: ‘In conscience, I believed I had to give myself completely, without thinking of my fatigue, believing that when God confers an important mission, he either gives the strength necessary to accomplish it or he removes the mission. Moreover, for me, relaxing my effort would have represented a collapse.’ Familiar as he was with suffering and with death, it was through the participation in the sorrowful mysteries that he drew from prayer the grace of an ever more wonderful hope in the resurrection.”
