When the World Went Loud, the Monks Kept Still

Sometime in the spring of 2020, while the rest of America was panic-buying hand sanitizer and arguing about which streaming service to subscribe to, the monks at Saint Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts were doing what they had done every day for decades: rising before dawn, praying in choir, putting up jars of jam, and saying very little.

The COVID-19 pandemic arrived like a kind of forced experiment in what human beings actually need. Screens multiplied. Noise filled rooms that had never been quiet to begin with. Anxiety spiked. And yet, in that wooded corner of central Massachusetts, the Trappist community at Spencer Abbey experienced something closer to continuity than disruption. Their abbot noted in interviews that the crisis had changed almost nothing in their daily rhythm, because their life was already built on restraint.

A Life Already Ordered

The Cistercians of the Strict Observance, commonly called Trappists, follow a rule that parcels out the hours with careful intention. Work. Prayer. Silence. Sleep. The same cycle, seven days a week, season after season. Speech is permitted, but sparingly. Food is plain. The purpose of each restriction is the same: to keep appetite from becoming appetite's own master.

This is temperance, in the classical sense. Not the grim self-denial of someone white-knuckling through a craving, but the ordered life of a person who has decided, deliberately, what things are actually for. Food is for sustaining the body in service of prayer and work. Words are for truth and charity. Rest is for restoration. Each created good has its proper place, and the Trappist day is structured around keeping it there.

Their life was already ordered by restraint — so when the outside world lost its bearings, they had bearings to keep.

Created, Fallen, and the Appetite Problem

Catholic anthropology describes the human person as created in the image of God, wounded by original sin, and capable of genuine renewal through grace. One of the clearest symptoms of that wound is disordered appetite: the tendency to use created goods not as means toward human flourishing but as substitutes for the flourishing itself. We eat past hunger. We fill silence with noise not because we have something to say but because silence frightens us. We check our phones the way earlier generations might have reached for a cigarette.

The pandemic made this visible in almost cartoonish ways. By some counts, daily screen time in the United States jumped by more than an hour per person in 2020. Social media engagement surged. Food delivery apps reported record numbers. People who had been vaguely uncomfortable with silence found themselves submerged in it, and they did not like what they found. The monks at Spencer Abbey, by contrast, had been practicing their response to silence for years. Silence was not a problem to be solved. It was a condition of the work.

Their income that year came, as it had for years, from the abbey's jam and jelly operation, a small commercial enterprise that kept the community financially grounded without requiring much engagement with the digital economy. Rows of strawberry preserves and blueberry jam went out in the mail while the outside world refreshed its news feed. The transaction was almost comically analog. It worked.

Temperance Is Not Renunciation

It is easy to misread Trappist life as a rejection of created goods. It is actually the opposite. The monks eat real food, sleep real sleep, do real manual labor, and gather for real communal prayer. What they have given up is not the goods themselves but the disordered use of them. They still speak; they simply speak less, and with more care. They still eat; they simply eat what the table provides. The virtue at work is not contempt for the world but a properly calibrated affection for it.

The Catholic understanding of the person insists that redemption does not destroy what creation made. Grace restores nature; it does not replace it. A temperate person does not stop enjoying food, companionship, rest, or beauty. They enjoy those things more cleanly, because appetite is no longer running the whole show. The monks of Spencer Abbey, through decades of practice, had reached something like that equilibrium. When the pandemic asked everyone else to reduce, to slow down, to sit with what they had, the monks simply kept going.

There is a particular irony in the fact that articles about their quiet persistence circulated widely on the very platforms that were contributing to the noise. People shared stories about the monks the way they shared recipes or home workout videos, looking for something to hold onto. What they found was a community that had already found it, a long time ago, in Spencer, Massachusetts, on a piece of land that smells of pine and warm fruit preserves, where the bells ring seven times a day whether anyone is watching or not.