February 7, 2009
New abbot at Vina monastery reflects on changes
in community
By Denise MacLachlan
Herald staff
Abbot Paul Mark Schwan of the Abbey of New Clairvaux in Vina has witnessed significant changes in the Trappist community over the past three decades. Cathy Joyce/Herald photo
The community of Trappist monks at the Abbey of New Clairvaux in Vina is undergoing a quiet transformation.
After 38 years as the monastery’s spiritual father, Abbot Thomas X. Davis retired Dec. 1 having reached the mandatory retirement age of 75. On Jan. 10, the community elected Father Paul Mark Schwan, 52, the community’s vocations and novice director since 1989, as the new abbot for a six-year term.
Abbot Schwan is a native of Michigan, N.D. He received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and humanities from Cardinal Meunch Seminary, the college seminary of the Diocese of Fargo, N.D. While in high school, he read Thomas Merton’s study of Cistercian history, “The Waters of Siloe,” and was drawn to Trappist life, he said in an interview with The Herald when he was in Sacramento recently.
He decided not to pursue studies for the diocesan priesthood and worked at the then Minneapolis Tribune for two years, thinking about a career in journalism. Instead, at his spiritual director’s suggestion, he began a correspondence with the community at Vina, eventually entering the Abbey of New Clairvaux in 1980.
He became the monastery’s archivist in 1987 and was ordained to the priesthood in 1988.
Abbot Schwan has witnessed significant changes in the community at Vina over the past 28 years. As the monks have become older, he said, they’ve had to hire people to help out in the orchards. The monastery supports itself by cultivating and selling walnuts and plums, and until recently, the monks did all of the work themselves.
“We were more self-enclosed when the community was younger,” Abbot Schwan recalled. “At this time of year, we would all be out in the orchard together pruning the trees, but our community is smaller and older now, so we have employees.”
The community is also more culturally diverse. Of the two dozen monks at the Abbey of New Clairvaux, almost half are non-native English speakers from other countries, including Vietnam, Brunei and Kenya. Incorporating monks from radically different cultural backgrounds into one community brings its own challenges, Abbot Schwan noted.
“People’s perception of life and the behavior that flows from that perception are largely cultural values,” the abbot said. “If people come from very different cultures, the chances of misunderstanding one another in little ways are much higher. So we listen closely to one another.”
As a cloistered community, the monks are together all day, every day, the abbot noted, so they learn from one another continually. The careful listening that goes into understanding another’s accent also goes into understanding another’s intention.
“One visitor commented that Vina is such a United Nations,” he said. “He said it was our gift to the order.”
In addition to changes within the community, the monastery is undergoing changes in its public profile. The monks added a vineyard and winery to the monastery’s agricultural operations in 2000, and began marketing the wine in 2005, Abbot Schwan said. Now the monastery holds wine tastings on Sunday afternoons as well as an annual lobster feed.
The Sacred Stones project — the reconstruction of a medieval Cistercian chapter house on the grounds at Vina — already draws groups of visitors to the monastery, and the number of visitors will increase when the chapter house is completed, the abbot noted.
The monastery is already very busy on the weekends, he said, and the increase in visitors has prompted the monks to build a handsome new wall around their enclosure, to keep the monks’ space undisturbed by visitors who don’t notice the “community members only” signs.
“There’s some nostalgia for the good old days when no one knew we were there,” the abbot said.
But although the increase in visitor traffic is new to the community at Vina, it is nothing unusual for a Cistercian monastery, he observed.
In Kentucky, there are signs on the freeway announcing the Abbey of Gethsemani and busloads of tourists are dropped off at the gate every day, he said, yet the monastery makes sure the community is sheltered from the tourist activity. The same is true of the Abbey of Our Lady of the Snows in France, he added, which draws 165,000 tourists each year.
“People are hungry for some connection to a spiritual life,” he said. “That’s why they come to the abbey, why they buy the wine.” The task for the community is to handle the increase in visitors while continuing its life separate from the disturbances.
As he steps into his elected role as the abbey’s spiritual father, responsible for the spiritual and physical welfare of his community, Abbot Schwan notes that learning how to be a spiritual father is going to take some time.
“But I remind myself to be patient with myself, and I know that the community will be patient with me, too,” he said.
