facebook-pixel

Michael O’Brien: The hard-won wisdom about change that I learned from a SLC law firm and a Utah monastery

I hate that nothing lasts forever, but Trappist monks taught me how to embrace change.

As yet another new year begins, I’m stuck ruminating on a simple truth recognized by philosophy, science and religion alike: Nothing lasts forever.

The New Testament Book of James (4:14) confirms: “What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.”

Honestly, I hate it. And 2025 won’t help.

The anniversary that never was

(Michael O'Brien) The Jones Waldo building sign on Salt Lake City's 200 South and Main Street, about 2019.

This was supposed to be the year when the law firm where I worked for almost four decades — Jones Waldo Holbrook & McDonough — would celebrate its 150th anniversary. Instead, it no longer exists.

Utah founding father/lawyer Joseph Rawlins started the firm in 1875, about the same time Wyatt Earp began his career as a lawman and just before Custer’s last stand. In 1892, Rawlins served as Utah’s delegate to Congress.

He introduced the bill that provided for Utah’s admission into the union and served in the U.S. Senate. When he died a century ago, The Salt Lake Tribune proclaimed: “Another giant has fallen in the front rank of Utah’s Old Guard.”

For many years, I practiced law at the firm Rawlins started. We worked/played hard, tried to earn money, and hoped to improve our community. I made lots of friends and planned to retire there.

Unfortunately, that unpleasant universal truth that nothing lasts forever had other ideas. We closed the firm two years ago, for a variety of reasons I am still sorting out in my heart and my head.

Most of us, including many staffers, joined another legacy Utah firm named Parsons Behle & Latimer.

(Michael O'Brien) Michael O’Brien’s law firm career captured in coolers in May 2022.

The monastery that closed, too

As I navigated this difficult passage, I realized my friends, Utah’s Trappist monks, once again had much to teach me. They had survived a similar journey.

In the 1970s, after a family divorce, I basically grew up at the Huntsville monastery. I tell this story in my 2021 book, “Monastery Mornings: My Unusual Boyhood Among the Saints and Monks.”

The monastery, founded in July 1947, closed in 2017 due to a variety of changing forces in the monastic world. A dozen or so remaining monks had to go somewhere else.

Some joined other abbeys, but most moved into a Salt Lake City retirement community that could help meet their geriatric needs. Watching these old monks, I learned five important lessons about facing change.

Lesson 1: Find happiness where you are

Utah Trappist monk Father Alan Hohl, a former World War II Navy aviator, cherished the Huntsville abbey he helped build. He was terribly sad when it closed.

Instead of wallowing in despair, however, he raved to me about the small apartment where he lived out his final five years. He watched the World Series and enjoyed an occasional Trappist beer from his own refrigerator.

He called it “a palace.” The old monk found happiness where he was instead of despairing about where his happiness once had been.

Lesson 2: Heal pain with love

(Karen O’Brien Taylor) Brother Nicholas Prinster and Mother Teresa of Calcutta at the monastery in October 1972.

Shortly after the Trappists arrived in Utah, Brother Nicholas Prinster left his boyhood Colorado home. He opted out of medical school, disclaimed rights to the family business and joined the monastery.

For 70 years, the tall, strong man herded cattle, ran the farm, and built beautiful wooden clocks for family and friends. His heart broke when his monastery closed.

He accepted it…quietly. The last time I saw him, he smiled and pointed out the beautiful flowers growing along the path where I pushed his wheelchair.

He explained how he navigated change in a eulogy for a family member. “We are, all of us, broken,” he said. “We live by mending, and the glue that we are mended with is the grace of God, and what is the grace of God but love?”

Lesson 3: Live in the moment

(Chris Detrick | The Salt Lake Tribune) Father Patrick Boyle talks with visitors in the bookstore and gift shop at the Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity in Huntsville in 2017.

Father Patrick Boyle arrived at the abbey from St. Louis in 1950, right after watching Stan Musial hit a home run for his beloved Cardinals. Once there, he rarely left.

Yet, he met (and blessed) hundreds of visitors each year in the abbey bookstore. He was the last monk to leave in 2017.

After the move, I asked Father Patrick how he felt about leaving the only home he had known for 67 years. I was mourning, so his answer surprised me.

He called it “a piece of cake.”

“The past is the past,” he stated, “and God will take care of the future, so my job is to live in the present.”

Lesson 4: Be with brothers and sisters

Father Patrick could have moved to another Trappist monastery. He visited the lovely Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where writer/theologian Thomas Merton had lived.

Merton once described the muddy fields surrounding the Kentucky monastery as “our spiritual directors and our novice-masters.” Yet, Father Patrick moved to the Utah retirement home with the other monks.

Trappists take a vow of stability, saying, “[W]e promise to commit ourselves for life to one community of brothers or sisters with whom we will work out our salvation in faith, hope and love…[We] entrust ourselves to God’s mercy experienced in the company of brothers or sisters who know us and accept us as we are.”

When I asked Father Patrick why he chose two small rooms over the rolling hills of central Kentucky, he said, “my vow of stability is not just to a place, it also is to my brothers.”

Life is a constant process of finding and rebuilding community.

Lesson 5: One bite at a time

Father David Altman was the last Utah abbot. Before joining, he had enjoyed a good life as an accountant in the Southern California sun.

He gave it all up to become a monk, but it was not easy. A reporter once asked how he did it. “Like a flea eats an elephant,” he replied, “…one bite at a time.”

He’s used the same basic technique for the past eight years during his time of great personal change. And now, he’s the last Utah monk standing.

Applying the monks’ lessons at a new law firm

My new law firm, Parsons Behle, also has deep roots in Utah and the Old American West.

In 1882, shortly after the shootout at Tombstone’s OK Corral and as Annie Oakley appeared in her first Wild West show, founder William Dickson relocated his law practice to Salt Lake City.

U.S. President Chester A. Arthur appointed Dickson the U.S. attorney for the Utah Territory in 1884 to prosecute polygamy cases. Yet, he was so skilled that even The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints later hired him to help on legal matters.

Dickson died in Los Angeles in 1924. The Tribune eulogized him as a “picturesque and heroic figure of the early West” who was “kindly, considerate and just.”

(Michael O'Brien) An illustration of William Dickson and Joseph Rawlins from The Salt Lake Herald on Nov. 3, 1896.

It turns out that the founders of my two law firms — Joseph Rawlins and William Dickson — knew each other quite well. They were contemporaries, part of a small cohort of lawyers in pre-statehood Utah, and perhaps even friends.

Parsons Behle is a place where we work/play hard. We try to earn money but also improve our community. I am making new friends there.

Every goodbye includes the possibility of a hello

A law firm, of course, is hardly a monastery.

Despite their differences, both are communities where people commit substantial time, energy, pride, devotion, even love toward a common goal. Like monasteries, law firms rise or fall depending on the strengths of the relationships within.

After watching the Utah Trappist monks adapt to significant changes, I’ve stumbled upon a viable game plan for living with my own significant changes:

• Like Father Alan, I try to find happiness where I am.

• Like Brother Nicholas, when feeling broken I look for the love and beauty that soothes the pain.

• Like Father Patrick, I strive to build new community.

• As I do, I seek to live in the moment, trying not to worry too much about what may happen.

• And, like Father David and the flea that ate the elephant, I take on these important and daunting tasks one bite at a time.

I really can’t articulate the deep sadness I still feel knowing my beloved Jones Waldo will never get to celebrate its 150th anniversary in 2025. But, with the help of the Utah monks, I now hope to enjoy the 150th anniversary of Parsons Behle in 2032.

Yes, nothing lasts forever, and I always will hate that. Thankfully, within every goodbye is the possibility of a hello.

(Courtesy photo) Writer and attorney Michael Patrick O'Brien.

Michael Patrick O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City who frequently represents The Salt Lake Tribune in legal matters. His book “Monastery Mornings: My Unusual Boyhood Among the Saints and Monks,” about growing up with the monks at an old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, was published by Paraclete Press and chosen by the League of Utah Writers as the best nonfiction book in 2022.