Our material culture is largely disposable, thanks to technology and more than that, a prevailing attitude that is deeply rooted, largely invisible, and amounts to something close to "eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die." And it's getting worse, if the construction methods of typical modern housing are compared with those of even a generation ago as an indication of trends. Sometimes things are made clearer by going to extreme contrasts. So today I'd like to look at a situation that is about as far from your typical apartment-complex project as you can get: the planned church at Clear Creek Abbey outside Hulbert, Oklahoma.
I've never been to Hulbert or visited the Abbey. But somehow I got on their mailing list even though I'm not Catholic, and I make a donation every year mainly to get their nice big calendars. All I know about the place is what's on their website and what the abbot, Brother Philip Anderson, writes in his letters, which are nothing like the usual charity-solicitation things we often get in the mail.
In the one that came the other day, he describes their plans for the church building. Money is mentioned nowhere in the letter. What he describes instead is the extremes to which they are going to get what they want, which is, as the enclosed donation slip says, "an abbey to last a thousand years."
There is a professional building contractor in overall charge, and photos on their website show what looks like a conventional building site with modern backhoes, etc. being used. So this is not an all-amateur project by any means. But the meaning of "amateur" in the sense of someone who does something for love rather than money applies especially to the church part of the project.
Take the doors, for instance. The abbey is in a wooded area of Oklahoma, and the monks have harvested lots of oak trees, built their own sawmill, and have cut enough lumber to make thick mortise-and-tenon doors that need no nails or glue to hold them together. These doors will hang on hinges that the monks will forge in their own blacksmith shop.
The roof of the church will be supported by 56 beams, cut and installed by the monks, beams that will support a red-cedar ceiling also made by the monks.
The most telling phrase comes when the abbot describes the 78 choir stalls, which are kind of individual niche seats for the monks to sit, stand, or kneel in during the chanting and other operations that go on in their daily Divine Office. Prayer is the most important thing that the monks do. And those who chant the Office spend about five hours a day in the choir stalls. As the abbot puts it, a monk's choir stall "is a critical furnishing: the stall is to the monk what the cockpit is to the fighter pilot."
That striking comparison sums up both the parallels and the radical differences between the monks of the Abbey and, well, pretty much everybody else in the modern world. Speed and quick action are of the essence to a fighter pilot; so much so, in fact, that we are probably seeing the gradual waning of that profession in preference to robot-guided devices that can respond faster than any human being. But the fighter pilot has a definite purpose: to shoot at enemies. And in order to do that, he has to be in a place designed to expedite his task effectively.
So does the monk. Only his enemies are not usually visible. That doesn't mean they aren't real. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of church history realizes the power of its enemies, and how prayer is the chief weapon humans can employ in that conflict.
Another weapon is persistence. That's one reason the monks are putting so much of their own labor into doing things that in a secular setting would be rejected as absurdly costly and inefficient. Who builds his own sawmill to make lumber anymore? Who makes his own doors and hinges rather than going down to Lowe's? Nobody I know of, except the monks up in Oklahoma, and probably other monasteries around the world engaged in similar projects.
I suppose that while they're forging the hinges, they'll make a few replacement parts so that when the originals wear out in a few hundred years, they'll just go down to the stockroom, blow the dust off, and install new ones. Only "new" will apply to objects that will have been kept for centuries. Almost nobody even thinks that way anymore, let alone does anything about it.
But the monks have good reasons to think that way. It was a secular Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, who popularized the Latin phrase sub specie aeternitatis, "under the aspect of eternity." Before his time, nearly everybody thought that way, realizing that our time on earth was just a flicker of a candle compared to eternity spent either in Heaven or Hell. Only when people began to focus mainly on present-day issues was it possible even to categorize the older manner of thought with that phrase, as a fish doesn't realize it's in water until you pull it out into the air.
This is not necessarily an argument against efficiency or mass production or making and selling things that don't last very long. There are good reasons for all those things. But I simply want to use the examples of the monks at Clear Creek Abbey to show that it's not the only way to do things. Depending on your priorities, you may do things differently than other people do. And the priorities of the masons, millworkers, carpenters, and blacksmiths at the Abbey show that if you really believe in eternal things, efficiency will no longer be your god.
Sources: Abbot Philip Anderson's August 2026 letter to the Friends of Clear Creek Abbey was the source of the quotation above and the information about their building methods. The Abbey's website is at https://clearcreekmonks.org.
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