Caring: This Is The Gift -- In Damp, Rural Oregon, Trappist Monks Interrupt A Life Of Silence And Prayer To Bake And Sell Their Fruitcake

While gentle silence enveloped all things, and night in its swift course was not half gone, thy all-powerful word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne.

- Wisdom of Solomon, 18:14-15.

Most of all, the Trappist Abbey is a place of great silence.

The little monastery is nestled on a wooded hillside, surrounded by farmland and forest and the quiet vineyards of Oregon's Yamhill County. It is home to 35 monks, average age 66, who have vowed to live in simplicity, poverty and prayer so that they may better hear God.

At the moment, though, Brother Patrick Corkrean is tuned into the monastery's 800 line, listening to Robert-from-Kent order fruitcake with a VISA card.

"Our traditional fruitcake? $23.50 for three pounds . . ." Brother Patrick says. "Sounds like you're already on our mailing list . . . Lemme take your card number."

Brother Patrick slumps in his swivel office chair smack up against a glowing blue computer screen. The monastery's $100,000-a-year, for-profit, mail-order business is crammed into a converted closet at the back of Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey. The red-bearded baby boomer wears medieval robes, imitation Birkenstocks and a headset with sponge ear phones. He is hooked up to a toll-free line. He is typing yet another order for the confection that has been the abbey's bread-and-butter, so to speak, for the past 16 years. Even monks must earn a living in this temporal world.

Shipping? Gift card? Second-day air? God bless and thank you for your business!

Brother Patrick sometimes wonders how, in seeking a life of cloistered contemplation, he wound up with a career in telemarketing.

Eight orders a day, a thousand fruitcakes a week, peak holiday season. They call extolling last year's fruitcake, polished off before New Year's. They call because Christmas is near and their families are far. They call, hard of hearing. They call from Washington, D.C., Issaquah, Florida, New York. They call complaining about the Abbey's rock-hard biscotti. ("But Madame, you must remember it is a dunking cookie.") Holiday rush. Melodrama. Shipping takes THAT long? ("The reality is we're trafficking in a luxury good. It's not like somebody needs a kidney in Kansas City in a couple days.")

Yes, this is a real monastery; no, it's not a spiritual hotline. Yes, he is a monk; no, he's not a priest, he cannot hear confession. Yes, of course he will pray for you; blessings are shared with an open heart, no minimum order required.

Brother Patrick: "I used to think this job was pretty invasive. Some afternoons, I'd just conk out and have to hit the sack for a while. Having an 800-number is a lot like having a guest house."

Trappist monks follow the Benedictine rule on hospitality. In the Middle Ages, this involved providing refuge from feudal wars and highway robbers. These days, at Our Lady of Guadalupe Trappist Abbey, it means giving guests a place to retreat from contemporary madness, a simple bed and a blanket, some time and trees and quiet. For Brother Patrick, hospitality has come to mean offering a sense of welcome even during hurried exchanges about credit-card expiration dates.

"You can sense their tension on the telephone. Stress. I know what it's like. They're panicking. I've got to be calm and establish the context. In the old days, I'd think, `I've got to get this call over with.' Now I'm trying to be patient."

People are hungry, the monk says, and not just for fruitcake. They hunger for something beyond their regular lives, something beyond getting the bills paid and the presents wrapped and the house decorated in time for the big party.

Abbot Peter McCarthy: "I can't tell you how many people tell me they are empty at Christmas . . . Currier and Ives . . . Chestnuts . . . people are searching for meaning. It's in the heart, not in a store window."

THE RULE OF ST. BENEDICT, in ancient Italian, speaks about the importance of caring. Obsculta, o fili . . . et inclina aurem cordis tui . . . "Listen carefully . . . and attend to them with the ear of your heart."

Heart, for the early desert monks, was really more like gut. Where the senses come together, where you feel. A deep listening, a connection to another human being, nothing to do with bartering or selling or over-intellectualization. Caring. This is the gift.

"If there are people, your readers, and Christmas brings up feelings and they are asking themselves: What is Christmas about - beyond the external? Those are really worthwhile questions because Christmas is about mystery," Brother Patrick says. "It's about the divine getting involved with the human. That happens more than every December 25th."

Trappist, or Cistercian, monks have been contemplating the holy and the human since the order was founded a thousand years ago in medieval France. Worldwide, there are now about four thousand Trappist monks and nuns, a dozen monasteries and five convents in America. The teachings spread from Europe to Nova Scotia to Rhode Island to New Mexico, where a group of monks bought a dude ranch in 1955 and founded a Trappist Abbey named after Our Lady of Guadalupe, patroness of nearby Mexico.

After seven years of unsuccessful farming, they sold the ranch to Benedictine monks and moved to 1,300 rolling acres about an hour southwest of Portland, Ore. The farming they do now is mostly for fun. They earn enough from the fruitcake and a book bindery and a wine labeling and storage business to support a local food bank and the county emergency shelter and themselves.

Another monastery in Kentucky sells enough fruitcakes so that is the only kind of work they do. Brother Patrick has tasted their product and deems it "rather light," a dry Midwestern pastry style that's so crumbly they have to enclose special slicing instructions to prevent customers from mooshing the cake when it is served.

Here, in the damp Northwest, the Abbey's fruitcake is moist. Every year the monks bake 15 tons of fruitcake laden with candied cherries and pineapple, a dark concoction that holds together in slices that resemble stained glass. Consumer Reports last month rated the fruitcake: "Good."

The monks have been in the kitchen for the past 10 months, the past 16 years. They soak each fruitcake in brandy and age it at least three months. They believe the holy spirit is everywhere, all the time. They have faith their prayers make a difference. They embrace life as a mystery, the virgin birth at its heart.

EACH DAY STARTS in darkness and silence.

At 4:15 a.m., Vigils, the first bell, murmured prayers, flickering candles, the peace of early morning, a mist hanging over the fields.

At 6:30, Lauds, dawn prayers, then Community Mass. An old couple shuffles into a back pew, wrapped in wool and ragged sheepskin. The monks hunch over their chant books, inclined in various postures. In the pale dawn, they are a beautiful tableau of draped robe, creamy shadow, soft beard, bald pate, glowing glasses, gentle angle. The light spills down, lingering on their shoulders.

By 8:15 a.m., Brother Eugene Brodaczynski toils in the stainless-steel fluorescent bakery wearing white sneakers and a baker's hat.

He mixes 19 pounds of boiled raisins, 11 pounds of honey, three quarts of water, 40 eggs, three pounds of powdered egg yolk, eight pounds of high-gluten flour, three-quarters of a pound of cinnamon and mace, three pounds of melted margarine, several long swigs of pure almond emulsion and sherry rumco, 14 pounds of glaceed cherries, 17 pounds of candied pineapple, 12 pounds of walnuts, six pounds of pecans plus nine hand-picked perfect pecan halves to decorate each top.

The recipe makes 38 three-pound fruitcakes. The batter is quite sticky. It tastes like molasses, though it has none.

Brother Eugene and his helpers smooth and pat and weigh each loaf. They look like elves in paper sailor caps. They work without radio or much talk. The 70-gallon mixer whirs, the faucets gush, the forklift thumps, the air smells like vanilla, not a mote of flour out of place.

The abbey's bakery, or "The Fruitcake" as the monks call it, is so tidy it could pass inspection at a nuclear reactor, and, in fact, Brother Eugene trained as a pile driver at Hanford in the 1950s, before he hopped on a Greyhound bus and landed at the abbey, never again to leave.

It was 1957. He had served in the Korean War, Pusan perimeter, engineering supply, which means his depot didn't see direct combat, but what he did see was bad enough. Shot up caravans. Little kids hanging around the train station begging for food to keep alive. Barefoot families streaming down from the north, trying to get away from the fighting, but no place to live. They stayed in cardboard boxes. They had no toilets. They were sick. Then the cardboard caught fire and the wind swept up the hill and the flames jumped across, gutting even older buildings. The Pusan Fire.

Brother Eugene doesn't speak for a long time. He goops batter into loaf pans at a furious pace, filling 15 cake tins without a word. "I'm trying to keep going here," the monk says. He turns on the oven. It creaks and wails as the air inside heats.

"All they had was whatever is left of cardboard after it burns. That's what I call devastation," the monk recalls. "Those things never leave your mind. At least, I don't forget. I can't be cold toward such a thing. It moves a person."

Brother Eugene, at 27 years old, was moved to become a monk.

"There was no way I myself could help them as a nation or a city or community to better themselves. Even if I was a millionaire I could only just touch the things they need."

So he put his petitions before God. "I just began praying for those people. I do pray for them still. Oh, yes. A simple life, a prayerful life, that's the main attraction: to serve the Lord praying for the world, not only the people here, the family, everybody throughout the world, wherever they are, whoever they are. That was one of my attractions to come to the monastery."

The other attraction was "Seventh Story Mountain," journalist Thomas Merton's account of his journey from the 1940s New York arts scene to a Kentucky monastery. Eugene stumbled on the book when on duty in Korea, and while thumbing the pages in his bunk, he was struck by a passage about monks scrubbing the floor on their hands and knees. Something about the calmness and purity of a simple life.

"In a world of noise, confusion and conflict," Merton wrote, "it is necessary that there be places of silence, inner discipline and peace; not the peace of mere relaxation but the peace of inner clarity and love based on ascetic renunciation."

Oddly, if there is a recipe for making a Trappist monk, this seems to be it: Catholic upbringing, enlist in the Army, serve in a war, discover the writings of Thomas Merton, return home, give up traditional family life, join a monastery. The U.S. military might be surprised to realize its role in recruiting Trappist monks. World War II, occupied France, the Philippines, Vietnam, Korea, Panama . . . the abbey is filled with veterans who read Merton in the barracks and then left the armed forces to live quiet celibate lives.

Of course, things have changed in the 40 years since Brother Eugene took his vows. Back then, the monks did not talk. These days, they speak, but only during the day. After 7:30 prayers, the monks enter a night of grand silence.

"You need silence if you're going to live this life," Brother Eugene says. "How could you hear God if you didn't have silence?" He creases squares of silicone-coated paper to line the baking tins. He pauses. He places his palm atop his fuzzy crew cut. Long ago, he communicated only in sign language.

"Hopefully, I have grown," he says. In gentleness. In wisdom. In humor. "I surely am not going backwards."

Trappist monks vow to live in poverty, simplicity, humility, charity, chastity, stability, obedience. The monks pray together seven times a day. They share with the poor. They are committed to the community, to place.

Customers on the 800-line tell Brother Patrick it's nothing to commute from the desert to Los Angeles, from Sacramento to San Francisco. To the former Californian, this is inconceivable. The cloistered monks live where they work. The abbey has a sane, steady rhythm. The fruitcakes bake slowly, 275 degrees for two and three-quarter hours.

"The world out there, there's always constant change. Urban dislocation. It's kind of disorienting," Brother Patrick says. "Here, we don't have much mobility. Our place is supposed to have spiritual meaning. It's not a glorified motel. It's witnessing to the value of a life that's kind of, what would we say, a life that's not fragmented. Of a piece."

After the end of work, around noon, the monks pray, contemplate, putter in the garden, fiddle with Windows 95, walk in the woods, read. At a monk's pace, just a couple of pages a day, Brother Patrick says, you can let thoughts sit, and in the silence of a simple life, they blossom into insights you might have missed in the hustle and bustle of life out there.

"Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul," Merton wrote. "For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality . . . Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because men are not prepared to receive them: for such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere except in the good soil of freedom, spontaneity and love."

Dusk at the abbey is quiet. Garden sprinklers rain onto two small ponds. Spanish moss drapes over yellow larch and red oak. A willow drops its leaves upon the water. Just before Vespers, the sun touches the moss at the base of the trees and then the light disappears into the ferns.

To the monks of this abbey, Christmas is about love and mystery.

Brother Patrick: "We encounter, let's say, Jesus, who was born at Christmas in very scrappy circumstances. He is of divine stature and he's born in a stable. If my life is plain, well, Jesus is with us in his plainness. I don't know how much compassion we're unlocking by this forgotten hidden life. That's where faith comes in - that our offering to God has tangible meaning, it's not just airy. This is a mystery, and if you believe, you believe."

Brother Eugene: "What Christmas means for me, the celebration of the birth of Christ and the beginning of the world as we know it today. How would you say, what can I say: When He came it changed things. The message of love. That's what Christmas is about, a season of love."

When it is dark enough so the stars shine bright in the sky, the monks shuffle into the chapel for prayer, crossing themselves as they walk. They wear hooded robes, Velcro sneakers, work boots, black orthopedic shoes. They walk stooped. They sit in monastic slump. There's hardly any light, not even a glow from an exit sign, just the sanctuary lamp, a few candles and a weak spotlight on a charcoal sketch of Our Lady. With its simple wooden rafters the chapel resembles a barn.

They monks chant. They sing. They pray. The Lord have mercy. They light two more candles. They pray again. They snuff the flames. Someone coughs, someone else blows his nose, and then it's so quiet you can hear the old men breathe. The bells ring three times. Outside, millions of stars. Inside, darkness. The monks sit for a while in peace and then shuffle into the silent night.

Paula Bock is a writer for Pacific Northwest magazine. Harley Soltes is the magazine's photographer. ------------------------------------------- Ordering Fruitcake

To order baked goods from Trappist Abbey Bakery, call 800-294-0105. It's $23.50 for a single 3-pound fruitcake or date-walnut cake. A box of two 1-pound cakes cost $18. Two honey almond biscotti loaves or two hazelnut chocolate chip loaves are $15.50.