Looking over Whitethorn Valley towards King’s Peak. Photo courtesy of Sanctuary Forest.



Door to the Refectory. Photo by Annette Holland.

REDWOODS MONASTERY AND THE FOREST
by Annette Boushey Holland

Through an odd twist of fate—or a miracle—Redwoods Monastery was established in the heart of California’s Lost Coast right before an era in which the watershed of the Mattole River could have been altered beyond recognition, either through construction of a dam or through logging of the old growth forests. The story was told to me by some of the sisters who left Belgium for California in 1962. When their Cistercian order decided to branch out and found a new monastery in the early 1960s, the sisters at first expected they would be settling in Africa, in what was then the Congo. But the political situation there was too unstable, and the plan was canceled. Instead, in 1962, the Catholic Church was offered a piece of land in the Whitethorn Valley for use as a monastery, and the sisters decided to relocate there. Since then, the presence of this contemplative community has had a profound influence on the unfolding history of the Mattole River watershed, especially on the movement to protect its ancient forest.

The story of the monastery’s establishment begins in 1939, when a man named Bob Usher arrived in the Whitethorn Valley. Usher was well known in Hollywood as a set designer and artistic director, and his work was honored by three Academy Award nominations. He arrived at the Mattole River, where the Barnum family owned a large piece of property, just as a logger was beginning to cut one of the giant redwoods. He stopped the logger, saying that he would buy the land, which he did.

Bob Usher lived on the land for two decades and built a house using only fallen trees. Then one day, when he was in a place called the Grove, down by the river, he had an experience that people in the Church refer to as a “locution,” which is like a vision except that one hears a voice. The voice that Bob Usher heard told him that the land belonged to God, and that he should give it to the Church. So he donated his land to the Catholic Church for use as a monastery, and eventually went to live in a men’s monastery called New Clairveaux, in Vina, California.

Around the same time that Bob Usher had his locution, the sisters from the Cistercian Monastery in Belgium had just been informed that their plan to move to the Belgian Congo could not proceed. They were then told of Bob Usher’s gift of land, and the Abbess, Sister Myriam, was offered a chance to visit it. At first, Sister Myriam was concerned about how remote the property was, but when she arrived she saw right away, as she says, that “The land was full of energy, mystery, beauty . . . and the trees in the grove were like a cathedral.” She spent eight days there, and fell in love with the land.

Sister Myriam’s decision to start a new monastery in northern California was in a sense a choice for a new embodiment of an ancient way of life dedicated to union between the human and the divine. Within the monastic cloister and within their silence, manual work, and prayer, the sisters strive for awareness of God’s presence. They seek the divine presence both within and around them, and some believe that the particular place in which this monastery is built is especially conducive to religious experience.

Madeline McMurray, a religious studies teacher at Humboldt State University, has been a frequent visitor to Redwoods Monastery for many years, and she finds the location to be “a place of amazing beauty.” She also says that she appreciates what the sisters have taught her about the Christian idea of incarnation. “Sometimes we have Christian ideals that are so spiritualized,” she says. “And when you go to the monastery you are reminded that it is in the specifics—that the spiritual life is in the specifics of how you do your work, how you tend the garden. And then as you are aware of God or Spirit coming into matter, into the material world, the land really becomes sacred.”

For the sisters who first came to the Lost Coast, however, the connection with the land and the transition to this new place was not easy. In fact, setting about the construction of a new life in this near wilderness was a nearly overwhelming experience. They traveled in traditional black-and-white habits, leaving an orderly schedule and ample silence for the challenge of living in a plywood cabin, planning for a new church and new buildings, and learning to speak a new language.

Finding themselves in the middle of the old-growth forest was also astonishing. Sister Godelieve, like Myriam, responded immediately to the beauty of the forest. She says that when she arrived, her first impression of the forest was to be “dumbfounded by the majesty of the trees . . . I couldn’t believe the grandeur. When we arrived, there was a footbridge over the Mattole, and the others were waiting for us in the Grove, and when we stepped out, they looked like little dwarfs to me, compared to the trees.”

Sister Godelieve’s initial appreciation for the forest has deepened through the years of contemplative life in its presence. She says that for her the trees have become “an image of going to God . . . They are so straight, it’s like the movement of the soul, upwards.”

For Sister Veronique, the early days were not easy. After the openness of the flat land and gently rolling hills of Belgium, she felt “closed in” by the redwood forest. To her the trees were beautiful, “but they offered no view.” Everyone else was so enthused about the big redwoods, Veronique recalls, “but my impressions were a little different than the others, and I learned very quickly that madrone was my favorite tree, not the redwood.” As time has passed, though, Veronique has found the monastery’s location to be helpful to her contemplative practice. She describes monastic life as “a pathway toward God,” and says that while the path does not exclude humanity, for her it is in silence that the experience is most profound, and she finds the quiet of the natural world immensely helpful. “If I go to the second meadow,” she says, “and it is real still, and I am in tune to that, I have to pray. I have to bow, and I have to see God. Because that’s when I feel the presence. And I can see it as much in nature as I can feel it in the church at meditation.”

Sister Myriam’s love for the forest also deepened as she lived there, and her dedication to the trees was of enormous importance to the early efforts of the surrounding community to organize for the protection of the watershed. Yet even today, she finds it difficult to talk about her relationship to the redwoods. “They speak through their silence,” she says. “They’re hospitable to life—insects to birds—to tears, to joy, to people. You can lean against them when life becomes too much. They speak, of stability—which our planet needs so badly right now. They make a plea for help, for protection.” It is Sister Myriam’s belief that “the members of this community are the guardians of the forest. But so is the forest the guardian of our souls.”

Their guardianship of the forest led the sisters of Redwoods Monastery into a collaborative effort, working with citizens of the Mattole River watershed, in which they played a crucial role. Rondal Snodgrass, who is now executive director of a local land trust known as Sanctuary Forest, was one of the early organizers of the effort and has been active all along. He says that if Redwoods Monastery had not been established in the Mattole watershed, the area “would be a lake for public recreation, like Lake Mendocino, or it would be one strip of clearcuts on both sides of the Whitethorn Road, like the hills around Scotia.”

Before the forest became an issue, the local citizens and women of the monastery received a lesson in what Myriam calls “gently confronting the authorities.” In the early 1970s, the Bureau of Reclamation announced a shocking plan to build a dam on the Mattole, between Four Corners and the Junction, which would have put the monastery under water. Local residents opposed to the project formed a committee, and they began meeting. Sister Diane, who joined the monastery in 1964, served as its second abbess, and now lives away, but she remembers how five of them went to a public hearing, held in Honeydew, “clear over the mountain,” in the back of the chaplain’s truck. “It was a great event,” Diane says, “because the ending was wonderful.” She remembers how Veronique stood up, as one of the last speakers, and said slowly, in her Flemish accent, “All I can do is ask for mercy. We’ve come here to found this monastery, and if I understand you well, your dam would inundate the monastery property. We want to live here. So, what can I do, but say ‘have mercy’?”

The plan for the dam was eventually dropped, and the monastery was allowed to continue its work. The nature of the monastery’s work is often not well understood. Sister Godelieve says that their calling—a little different than the ministries of teaching or nursing—is another way to dedicate their lives to the service of God. “It’s a different type of journey,” she tells me. “It’s a balance, according to the Rule of Benedict, and there is common prayer, individual prayer, lectio divinia or scripture reading, study and manual labor.” There is a great emphasis on manual labor in the Cistercian tradition, she explains, on doing simple work and living from the labor of your own hands.
Sister Kathy, who currently serves as mother superior for Redwoods Monastery, believes that part of the purpose of monasteries is to provide a place where those devoted to the contemplative life may “leave the world.” As she explains it, “You go apart to live a life totally dedicated to God. Typically monasteries have been on the margins of society and culture, rather than just right in the mainstream. The purpose of that distance is to see—to get a vision, to get perspective, to hear what’s happening—and monasticism traditionally has had a prophetic role to offer society.”

Redwoods Monastery is part of the Cistercian Order, which began at Citeaux, in France, in 1098. The members of this community are carrying on a traditional way of life that follows a set of rules written down by Saint Benedict shortly after the year 500. The founders of the Cistercian order had, by the time of their own turn of the millennium, grown disillusioned by the affluent lifestyle most Benedictine monasteries had adopted, and they wished to return to a simpler life of contemplation, to what they saw as the essence of the monastic tradition. They went off into what was then a vast forest to start the new order, and Cistercian tradition ever since has called for monasteries to be surrounded by nature. Citeaux, however, has in the last nine hundred years been surrounded by civilization, as have most of the other monasteries in Europe. Sister Kathy says that she feels privileged to have been called to live in such a magnificent place, and she also feels privileged to be part of an order carrying on a tradition that is as old as some of the massive trees that surround their enclosure.

The women of this monastery do not simply carry on the forms and rituals of an ancient tradition. Their community is filled with life and vitality, and they are innovators, having not only brought this Cistercian way of life to California in the early 1960s, but also having adapted and shaped it in response to the natural and human communities in which they found themselves.
Sister Myriam sees that monasteries today fill a different role from their predecessors in the Middle Ages, but there is a sameness as well. “A monastery is a monastery, and people come because it is founded upon communication with the divine, reception of the divine, on living in a way that says there is a spiritual dimension to our lives and to nature.” In the past, Myriam says, there was more emphasis on fuga mundi—the flight from the world. “But to me, a monastery is part of the world. It’s a dimension of the world.”

Everyone I speak to has grappled with the issue of how much the monastery needs to maintain separation from the world, and how much benefit can result from interaction with the world. When I ask Sister Kathy about this, she quotes Thomas Merton, the famous writer and theologian who was also a Cistercian monk, and who spent time at Redwoods Monastery. She tells me, “Merton says something like, ‘We leave the world only to discover that we are the world, that we carry the world within us.’ So, how do we contribute to the cry of humanity, to the cry of the environment? We contribute through prayer, first of all. We contribute through how we live our lives, our daily life. Monastic life is a gospel way of life, which means a way of love—love towards self, towards God, towards all people and creation. It’s not ethereal; it’s an incarnational reality, and we have to embody it; we have to live it. Obviously we fail, like everyone else. We fall down. But then we pick ourselves up and we grow. It’s a very concrete way of living.”

When Rondal Snodgrass describes the impact that the women of the monastery have had on his attitudes and work, he says, “What they’ve taught me, which has been a big influence on my role in Sanctuary Forest, is to not deny adversity, not to separate from adversity, but to try to merge, to engage with adversity, making it part of the whole experience. And in the same way, they’ve taught me how you don’t want to even get to the point where you could burn bridges.” They have always encouraged the environmental community to take an honest look at itself and “to include the adversary as part of yourself, not to exclude, not to demonize the opposite position in the dialogue.”
David McMurray, who has been on the board of directors of Sanctuary Forest since the early days, also sees the women of the monastery as helping to remind everyone of the value of the rotting tree, the value of the life process. “Always, when we as a group get bound up in the practicalities of details—like purchasing something when we had no money—they would take us back to the forest’s needs, the needs of the salmon. They would be the reminders of the necessity of looking at the fullness of life.”

Back in 1986, when red flags first appeared on trees in the forests of the Whitethorn Valley, a neighbor gathered them and brought them to the monastery asking what they meant. Sister Myriam started making phone calls, and soon a group of about a dozen people from the local community began to organize. They discovered that Collins Pine Company, based in Oregon, had completed a timber cruise to prepare for selling the six parcels they owned in the area, including 1,200 acres of old-growth redwood and fir. The group, which soon took the name of Sanctuary Forest, held meetings in the monastery’s guest dining room. There was no easy way for this initial group to protect the trees. Their first fundraising event was to offer $100 each and gather to hold hands around Big Red, a two-thousand-year-old tree in the heart of the forest. Their strategy was agreed upon in response to Sister Myriam’s expressing her belief, during one of the first meetings, of the importance of respecting and honoring the proprietary rights of the landowners. Somehow, they would have to buy the land.

Even though they had little money, they did have a vision and a philosophy. They shared a dream of establishing some kind of reserve to protect the headwaters of the Mattole River. As Sister Kathy expresses it, “All along the philosophy was to stay in dialogue, and not to get into opposition or polarity over the issues. It was to hang in there and try to meet the other, not out of reaction but out of love—out of love for the environment, out of love for God’s creation, out of love for humanity.”
Looking back at the early days when the fate of the forest was uncertain, many people remember Sister Myriam’s dedication as a source of inspiration and strength. “It was really Myriam’s heartfelt sense of what was happening,” Madeline McMurray says, “that motivated the rest of us to answer the call. And we did some things that were ridiculous, like buying property that we knew we couldn’t afford and had no money to buy. But Myriam had that kind of energy, and it worked.”
Rondal also mentions the contributions of Sister Diane, who served as abbess during critical years and was also on the board of directors of Sanctuary Forest. “She took the monastery to the edge,” he says. “And it was her clarity of vision, her unswerving commitment and her passion that, at many strategic moments, made the difference.”

The story of how Sanctuary Forest succeeded is long and complicated, but the critical factor was that a small group of committed people took huge risks, coming up with down payments from their own pockets when they had no idea where the rest of the money would come from. They continued to approach the executives of local timber companies and to maintain a dialogue with them even when the situation seemed hopeless. Their efforts involved years of perseverance, patience, and the bitter disappointment of losing ridge-tops of trees they had hoped to protect.

When they talk about the early attempts at negotiation, both the timber company executives and the representatives of Sanctuary Forest remember their meetings as unusual. Sister Veronique recalls going to the Eel River Sawmill with a few other people and feeling tremendously frustrated at the way “nothing moved.” Dennis Scott, vice-president of the company, remembers that it was “a little different,” meeting with a group that included Catholic sisters who promised to pray for him. For whatever reasons, the executives finally changed their minds about selling the trees, and Sanctuary Forest finally found the help it needed. The help came from hundreds of individual supporters and donors, from the Save-the-Redwoods League, from numerous foundations, from the voters of the State of California who passed Proposition 70 in 1988, and from the California State Legislature which also allocated funds in 1997 for the purchase of old-growth forest in the Mattole River watershed.

Thanks to all the hard work and prayer, about 10,000 acres of forest have been protected. Over 3,700 acres along the tributaries of the upper Mattole, including seven salmon spawning streams, have been joined together for what is now called the Upper Mattole River and Forest Cooperative; an additional 6,000 acres are protected through conservation easements held by Sanctuary Forest. The monastery is now surrounded by land that will be permanently protected for all of the forms of life that belong there. So just as the monastery gave the environmental community the gift of their vision, the local community has also helped protect the silence that contributes so much to the life of the monastery, that deepens the experience. It is within the silence that the members of the monastery find their source of power.

Many people come to visit Redwoods Monastery, some from far away, and quite a few are searching for an experience. As Sister Annette puts it, “It’s been said many times that there’s a monk in every person. In our times, we need that part of ourselves more than ever. There has to be a return to the center, to a quiet place, to a place where God speaks, and sometimes we have to go through a lot of noise to get there. But that longing is always there.”

The visitors go home to their own watersheds, where many of them volunteer to help their own charitable causes. Annette says that every person who serves life helps keep the balance, and everyone’s effort—no matter how small—is important. Life is served, she says, by “the common ordinary people who live from that place of honoring and fostering life, in their relationships and whatever they do. They may not see themselves as religious people, but in fact they are.”
Some of what has happened in the upper watershed of the Mattole is unique, and some of it has happened or can happen elsewhere. David McMurray sees the women of the monastery as having played a dual role as conveners and reminders: “They brought the community together and they named the threat.” These are common, even archetypal roles. What is highly unusual is how , in this watershed, the activists in a community defined by place have become linked with contemplatives in a community defined by faith.

Yet all of us can look for the binding elements—the connections that reveal our essential unity—in the places where we live. And finding that unity will change the way we live. As Madeline McMurray says, “When you are experiencing the divine in everything around you and then you become aware that it’s in danger, then it is an appropriate response to do something.” For Madeline, her involvement with Redwoods Monastery and especially with Sister Myriam have had a profound effect on both her awareness and her actions. And she sees that same effect in the lives of many others. Sister Myriam, Madeline says, “is so dynamically concerned about the forest as a living entity, so passionate. When the forest was threatened, she was really the energy that called everybody to attention. And it’s a deep, feminine voice, not just because she’s a woman, but because it’s the call of the Earth.”

Annette Boushey Holland is a freelance writer who has lived in Bayside (Humboldt County) for the last eighteen years. She works with local land trusts.