The tires buzz as the Volkswagen races over the rumble strips, my eyes scanning for radar guns and speed cameras. The relentless Washington suburban sprawl is ever-present, more highways, slap-dash suburbs and identikit shopping malls. Not a sidewalk in sight; the only greenery is the median strip and a Starbucks logo. The pace of concretization is remorseless, unstoppable and unspeakably sad to anyone who is not a property developer.
But there are still oases out there just beyond the desert of development, small unspoiled remnants of an older, slower, sounder world.
Beneath the soft curves of the hills overlooking the Shenandoah River, near the seductively named town of Berryville, Va., there is a Cistercian monastery. Spread over 1,200 acres, Holy Cross Abbey is an unabashedly rustic place existing to promote a simple, contemplative life, one which eschews materialism and focuses on manual labor and prayer. It’s hard to imagine anything less American than an institution that values silence, not stridency, and time-tested truths rather than TikTok, but there are 14 such monasteries scattered around this country, from California to New England.
An agnostic, I came to the Abbey seeking not Christ but quiet. For nearly two days I remained unplugged from the information world; no texts, e-mails, YouTube, Instagram, phone calls, etc. Instead of reacting to the Pavlovian demands of my iPhone, I worked at calming my overwrought mind by spending time walking the grounds, reading the philosopher Seneca and listening to podcasts about Stoicism.
“To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare oneself to die,” said both Socrates and Plato. Who am I to argue with them? As I enter my seventh decade of life, death is often on my mind, sometimes sitting heavily, and at other times teasing me with its impenetrable mysteries. My parents are dead. Friends are starting to pass away. Obituaries regularly announce the departure of the musical and cinematic icons of my youth. We are even told the planet itself is doomed, a victim of manmade climate change. But what people really mean by that is that humanity will vanish, and that notion doesn’t trouble me as much as it should.
One evening I walk up a hill to the small chapel and sit in candlelight listening to the monks sing their evening prayers. They are all elderly, dressed in thick, white cotton robes, topped with a black tunics and broad leather belts, and shod with sandals. Apart from their tube socks and reading glasses, they would have been indistinguishable from their brethren some 900 years ago.
But the monks are not cartoonish relics of the medieval past. In a crucial way, they are pioneers on a possible path to the future, because they are avowed environmentalists. By practicing sustainable agriculture, placing some of the order’s property under a conservation easement, and establishing a natural cemetery near a place where, during the U.S. Civil War, some 1,000 men lost their lives, they are actively restoring the land and the river basin.
White settlers and Black enslaved people have been farming the fertile soil of the Shenandoah valley for nearly three centuries, eventually displacing most of the Catawbans, Cherokees and Croatoans. I tried to feel their presence as I walked for miles through the land, taking comfort from the contours of the land and solace from the shade trees. Much of it lies fallow in keeping with the crop rotation practiced by the monastery. Around me there was almost nothing that would have been unfamiliar to those earlier peoples.
The hills on the horizon are a dark emerald color, thick with tall oaks and hickories, and the river is broad, the color of cafe au lait. Fat turtles lounge on logs soaking up the sun’s waning warmth, safe in the knowledge that they are no longer the popular menu items they would have been a couple of centuries ago. The resting fields are pulsing with shoulder-high vegetation: grasses, goldenrod, milkweed and more, providing an ideal home for insect life. Bumblebees, dragonflies and butterflies all flourish, as do cicadas and crickets, clicking and buzzing in their eternal search for mates.
Where there are bugs, there are birds: ravens and robins, buzzards and bluebirds, and the scarlet flash of a male cardinal in flight. In the near distance, I hear the pock-pock-pock of a pileated woodpecker, a big, beautiful bird that bears a strong resemblance to the absent ivory bill, last seen in the United States in 1944, one more victim of our rapaciousness.
Deer bound out from the weeds, surprising and pleasing me. They stop for a moment, skittishly casting glances over their backs, then spring away, their bright white tails moving metronomically. A few steps further on I find the desiccated remains of one of their tribe, only the dainty black hooves left, and the spine, curved elegantly like a treble clef or perhaps a question mark.
The appearance of a contrail in the robin’s egg blue sky reminds me that I am still here in the 21st century, not far from the capital city of an aging empire. I wonder if we and the rest of humanity will ever find our way back to sanity and sustainability. I think that if there is to be a chance, places like this modest little monastery will play a role in guiding us home, like fireflies in the dusk.
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