Branham: The Last Mass at St. Benedict’s Monastery 

Sunday was the very last mass at St Benedict’s Monastery in old Snowmass. For over 70 years, a spirit of contemplation has been fostered on the nearly 3,700 acres that back up to the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness. But this era is coming swiftly to an end. What will happen to this land that’s been so deeply loved — and shared — by the Roaring Fork Valley community? 

As I gazed at tender faces during the closing mass, I saw the look of loss. A deep ache that a land so sacred, enjoyed by multitudes, would now disappear from public life. 

St. Benedict’s Monastery has been a refuge, a home, a contemplative bastion, a beacon of a peaceful and simple life in devotion to the Divine since 1956. Temples, churches, mosques, synagogues, and all places of worship are alive not because of dogma, but because of the nature of the human spirit. We gather to remember. We gather to slow down. We gather to reorient out of the cacophony of urgency and become geological, like the intricate and astounding stone craft masonry that beams from every corridor, archway, and sweeping line at St Benedict’s. The structure holds a promise. A place is radiant because of the life that fills it. 

During mass, as sunlight leaked through the windows, gradually illuminating the stained glass rendering of Mother Mary in full colorful borealis splendor, the words that struck me were not from the Bible, but those by Colorado poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer.  

“I try to keep my heart soft. I try not to clench, not to harden, not to set . . this place even death cannot take away,” writes Trommer. 

What a place this is. St. Benedict’s stretches in every direction in a remarkable unfolding of Aspen groves, plateaus, rivers, shrubby mesas, and sweeping mountain views of Mt. Sopris and the Elk Mountain Range. Elk, deer, and coyotes move freely through the hills in their ancient migration wildways. 

There is a profound stillness. The kind that confronts. The land seems to invite an honesty of soul. Perhaps a feature of an ecology so wholly woven with cultivating inner tranquility. The kind we are hungry for. 

I’d long heard about one of St. Benedict’s most well-known residents, Abbot Thomas Keating. Keating was a Trappist monk, committed to a life of deep silence, prayer, observance, and manual labor, following the Rule of St. Benedict. He sought to move closer to divine love and practiced a holy simplicity at the monastery for nearly four decades. 

Wandering through the vast quiet, I wondered about the role of these particular wild lands in provoking Keating, in particular, to formulate his probably most well-known contribution to Christian mysticism: centering prayer. 

Centering prayer is a practice of going into your “inmost being,” to open one’s mind and heart — our whole self — to the ultimate mystery. By so doing, Keating writes, “our private, self-made worlds come to an end; a new world appears within and around us and the impossible becomes an everyday experience.” A way to shed the false self-system with its habitual patterns of seeking security, esteem, and power. Keating knew that these programs were always going to fail a human being. But there is another way. 

Such a spacious understanding of prayer as a transformational experience is closer to Buddhist practice than mainline Christian cataphatic prayer (using words, images, stories). A practice of via negativa, or a prayer of quiet, emptying, and wordlessness, in order to encounter pure Being. 

I have to imagine this emergence was only possible in co-collaboration with this particular landscape. The wild here already effuses such interior silence. The qualities of this place seem to be both an origin and a result of such decades-long contemplative practices. Letting go, freedom from attachment, inner radiance, the revealing of Ultimate Mystery, experience of full union, the touching of perfect peace. 

It is because of this profound and rare set of values that the loss of St. Benedict’s is so acute. In a country that is becoming rapidly more divided, violent, and loud, St. Benedict’s was a reminder of a different path. One that, as Keating writes, “addresses the human condition exactly where it is.” 

Centering prayer reconstitutes us from within and changes how and what we see, what and who we are. In short, according to Keating, it’s “A journey into the unknown.” A journey these lands are making now. 

What will become of a land, with its own rhythms and agency, that has been the driving creative intelligence spurring those who spend time there to pursue divine union with self, Ultimate Mystery, others, and the cosmos? What is the future of a place which has been the home of deep happiness, meeting the emotional aches percolating inside so many of us?  

I do not credit the religion of Catholicism or even the order of St. Benedict’s with this legacy. I honor the land. If these sacred trees, rivers, and mountains so deeply wrote their own story of life-giving practices to open the minds hearts of the humans here, what will the land do next? 

Could this land bring their new steward into the quiet of deep prayer? Might he, too, be inspired to consider how to continue the legacy of community building, ecological preservation, contemplative practice, and a life of peace? 

I intuit the land will live forward their ancient design. Of life spilling forward into more life. This place is a peaceful refuge. Whether it changes human hands for days or decades, I believe in the soul of the place. 

The transfer of ownership from St. Benedict’s to Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, known for building surveillance technology for ICE and military clients, is indeed a loss. It’s an end of a long-treasured cultural and spiritual haven, a disappearance of an unparalleled public space, and a privatization of the wild that, even in the Roaring Fork Valley, is jarring to experience.  

How do you say goodbye to a place long-loved? Perhaps we do not have to. Perhaps there is a way to continue what this place began. 

As I stood at the burial ground on site and watched the Elk Mountains gleam in the January sun, I thought of Trommer’s poem “Revival.” It is a prayer I say back to this one mountain valley and to those who have loved this land. It is a prayer I hear from the land itself to us. Maybe, it’s a promise. Maybe, it’s a prophecy. 

“But it was life itself that inspirited her, slipping like starlight into her every dark cell, life itself that whispered to her death-bent heart, You are not done yet with your loving.” 

Dr. Lindsay Branham is an environmental psychologist, scholar, author and Emmy-nominated filmmaker whose work explores embodied kinship between humans and the Earth. Pre-order her book Heartwood: The Wisdom and Healing Kinship of Trees and reach her at lindsay@lindsaybranham.com.