A siren screamed down 31st Street as six men faced one another in a dim church and began to chant.
They chanted standing up. They chanted bent over. Above a thumping bass from a passing car, they prayed to the holy trinity through St. Benedict that travelers would arrive at their destinations and for seasonable weather. They prayed “for this city and all who live here and for every city and community.”
When they had sung their last note, the monks walked two at a time back down the aisle of the church.
At the Monastery of the Holy Cross in Bridgeport, life revolves around prayer, the pursuit of a deeper knowledge of God and self, and — despite their urban location — isolation as a means to those goals. The Benedictine monastery and its guest house are on the flight path to Midway International Airport, but the institution’s motto is “silence in the city.”
The monks strive to maintain silence and isolation because it helps them pursue truth in God. They have email addresses, but most do not have cellphones. Although running a monastery in the third-largest city in America necessitates trips to the grocery store and taxes and other liaisons with the outside world, they generally avoid leaving the grounds altogether.
Many of the monks, who range in age from 29 to 76, started lives and careers in the secular world and turned to monastic life in search of truth that had previously proved elusive.
Prior Peter Funk, who leads the monastery, said some were teachers, city planners or steel cutters before they took vows. Funk himself was pursuing a career as a rock musician when he first attended a service at the monastery.
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“When I heard them saying the liturgy, I had this feeling like, ‘They’re doing what I’m trying to do, but they’re doing it authentically and I’m trying to make up something that I don’t have the authority to make up,’” he said.
Funk said while the eight monks try to shut the city out for the sake of their prayer, they also hope to offer some peace to Chicagoans.
“We live with our neighbors, all the pluses and minuses of city life,” Funk said. “And if we’re going to purify the city in some way, we have to know what that is like on the inside.”
An icon and a disfigurement
Funk, 54, said that even as the monks strive to remain separate from ordinary life in Chicago, the city also informs and reflects the spiritual work that goes on in the monastery.
“We don’t just shut out the city in the sense of thinking anything negative about the city,” he said.
He quoted the Book of Revelation, which predicts that a new city of Jerusalem would appear at the end of time.
Funk said the takeaway from that passage was that every city, including Chicago, is what he called an icon — that is, it contains some of what an eternal city could eventually be like.
“It’s just that in this life, every city is also a disfigurement of that icon,” he said. “I think being in the city helps us to recognize our dependence on others, the ways in which God wants us to relate to each other out of that dependence, not to be afraid of it.”
Father Edward Glanzmann, one of the monastery’s three founders, remembered how apprehensive he’d been when they first established themselves in the old Immaculate Conception Parish Church in 1991.
Cardinal Joseph Bernardin had invited them to be there and they had hoped to settle in a city, he said, but Chicago was larger than they’d originally had in mind.
“I thought, ‘Lord, you’ve got to be our strength because we don’t know how to do this,’” said Glanzmann, 72. “We don’t know how we’re going to be a sense of calm and a sense of hope and a sense of moving into the future.”
God, he said, had other plans. Two years after they’d settled in Chicago, one of the monks wrote to the Tribune editors: “Chicago’s problems may be many and obvious, but for this community of monks it’s still home.”
The monks have appeared periodically in the Tribune since then, and have been named in local publications recognizing their tradition of Gregorian chant and the contrast between their institution and Bridgeport.
The city occasionally influences the monastery in funny ways. In a more rural setting, Father Timothy Ferrell said bells would set the time and essentially replace the monks’ need for watches and other clocks. But in Bridgeport, the bell that tolled for the evening Vespers service was a problem for at least one neighbor, who worked nights and eventually showed up, frustrated, at the monastery door.
“Listen, father, I’m a good Catholic and I go to Mass,’” Ferrell remembered the man saying. “‘But all of the sudden I get (woken) up at 5:07 p.m!’”
They stopped ringing the bells quite as frequently after that, Ferrell said: “Being a good neighbor meant changing the schedule.”
Others come with more serious requests, the monks said.
Funk said a handful of people arrive every year looking for an exorcism — which the monks don’t conduct themselves, but they will give a referral for someone who can perform the process.
Or they come with some kind of despair. Glanzmann said they see it in all its forms — a relationship that isn’t working or a conviction that they aren’t lovable or some event that’s wreaked havoc in their lives.
“There’s a difference between who we are and what we do,” he said. “What we do is wrong. (But) we are loved no matter what, in an unconditional way. We do our best to communicate that to people so they can get back in touch with an experience of God.”
Emily Crews, executive director of the Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School, said a place such as the Monastery of the Holy Cross afforded Chicagoans an opportunity to think about how they interacted with the world. A place such as the monastery can prompt people to ask if they have opportunities for peace, isolation and reflection.
“Religion has always served that role for people,” Crews said. “It’s a mirror, even if you’re seeing your opposite, or if you’re seeing something that stands out — it’s an opportunity for critical self and social reflection.”
Traditional life in a modern city
Crews said the monastery offers Chicagoans a chance to think about what they might be missing or worth bringing into contemporary life from the past.
“I think there’s this idea that truth gets lost under the sediment of modernity, and you have to dig it out,” she said. “And part of the way you dig it out is by looking to the past, by removing yourself and engaging in a performance that might be more like someone from hundreds of years ago.”
The monastery is a place with a deep connection to the past. And while a monk in a sixth-century habit stands out walking down the sidewalk, their lives are not intentionally anachronistic, Funk said.
“But it is traditional in the sense of certain things we take for granted,” he said. “We do them because they’re tried and true, because they’ve been handed down to us from people who knew things that we are trying to learn.”
People whose lives are powered by technology often seemed to be rootless, he said.
“Nothing makes sense,” he said. “How does an internal combustion engine even work? How does the computer even work? Yet we’re completely dependent on these things.”
For the monks, the guiding force is the centuries-old rule of St. Benedict, which governs everything from conflict resolution to the predawn wakeup call and seven daily prayers.
Yet their lives are inflected with the modern. They have medical procedures. They have to liaise with construction workers about repairs to their bell tower. They maintain a sprawling garden, but they also patronize nearby grocery stores, including Costco and Mariano’s.
Anthony Daum, one of the monks assigned to the weekly grocery trip, said he avoids leaving the monastery otherwise. It’s a distraction from the main goal of monastic life: to focus on God.
‘Stay in that loneliness’
Seated in a red armchair in the monastery’s reception room, Daum, the youngest monk at 29, leaned forward and launched into an explanation of souls, or “what animates the body — a spiritual substance which is sort of naturally immortal.”
He paused and crossed one Birkenstock-clad foot over the other.
“I am kind of a nerd,” he said. “I read a lot of this stuff.”
At the monastery, there is the solitude for that kind of reflection and study. It allows someone like Daum to study Greek and to take the soul seriously.
But even within the cloisters of the monastery and behind the walls of its garden, with the city outside, there is also a solitude around each of the monks.
Monks are meant to be examples of Christianity in its highest form, Daum said, with the understanding that for most people, even observant Catholics, that example isn’t attainable: “If you have a family, for example, (you can’t) just set aside five hours for liturgical prayer.”
Besides leaving families and rejecting romantic attachments, the monks are not necessarily close with one another despite the proximity in which they live and work, Ferrell said.
“We strive to stay in that loneliness,” he said. “If you try to feed that too easily with other things, then it’ll prevent us from going to God … we would find that intimacy in him.”
Ferrell, 45, spoke on the porch of the monastery’s guesthouse and retreat building, which backs onto an extensive produce garden and tool shed. He had been pulling some weeds and inspecting a squash plant that he suspected may have stopped growing.
He’d replaced his floor-length habit with a navy blue short habit — like a smock with a hood — and black pants with black running shoes. There was not yet a decision on whether to pick the squash, he said.
Ferrell said most people who interacted with the monastery wouldn’t leave with some grand spiritual takeaway. But, he continued, he hoped the institution was a positive presence even for those who just passed by 31st and Aberdeen. He remembered that one neighbor, who lived a block or two away, only had one impression of the monastery.
“(The neighbor) said, ‘Oh, those guys, they shovel their snow,’” Ferrell said. “He noticed that, and it meant something to him.”
For those who make the monastery part of their lives — by coming to Mass or participating in a reading group or taking a retreat there — Ferrell said his hope was that the monks provided a “point of reference” for their spiritual lives.
“It helps them to see where we’re all headed,” he said.
Another monk in a short habit, black pants and black Tevas with socks brought buckets of rotten apples and other food scraps out to a compost heap before he took a ladder and a fresh bucket and began to pick apples from a tree. A plane roared southwest to Midway above Bridgeport. It was almost time for the first prayer of the afternoon.
It was at one of the afternoon prayers on a hot day in August that the church door cracked open and a man in a red shirt slid into one of the back rows.
The monks were well into their chant. The latecomer leaned forward and rested his head and his hands on the pew in front of him. He took deep breaths as the monks prayed for the recovery of the sick and peace to the dying and more peaceful times.
They finished chanting a few minutes later. A motorcycle engine roared. The monks raised their hoods and made their way back into the monastery. The man in the red shirt also left. Sunlight poured in as he walked out to the street. Then the door swung shut again and it was still.
