After commencement, after the honorary degrees and the keynote speaker and the calling of all the names and finally the all-campus picnic, Nate Wentz ’03 will be going straight to a monastery. The night of May 19, Wentz will be sleeping at the New Melleray Abbey, a Cistercian Catholic monastery in Peosta, Iowa.
Starting May 19, Wentz will be living at Melleray Abbey as part of his 6-week observership, which Wentz describes as “the first step to weeding out the people who don’t actually have the monastic calling.” The observership is followed by a mandatory period of at least several months of reflection, after which Wentz plans to return and live indefinitely.
Wentz has already visited New Melleray twice, staying for a total of three weeks. According to Wentz, the life the monks live is “practical guide for the imitation of Christ.” The idea is “communal living, work enough to support yourself but no more, and spend the rest of your time either in group prayer - which for a thousand years has taken the form of songs, specifically chanting with psalms, we go through all 150 of them every two weeks - or individual prayer, which would take the form of whatever your preferred notions are,” he said. Wentz said the way of life at Melleray can be described as either, “monks who farm or farmers who pray, depending on how you want to think about it.”
“It’s a life very close to the sacraments,” Wentz said. “Profoundly Catholic.”
Wentz’s Catholicism is fairly recent; he was baptized a year ago. Wentz was raised as a secular humanist, he said. There followed about a decade of nihilism and then some experimentation with Zen.
The problem with Zen, according to Wentz, was that without Buddhism, it lacked discipline. In this country, Wentz said wryly, Buddhism means, “I believe in reincarnation and I used to be, like, Nixon.” What could take the place of Buddhism? “The answer is Catholicism,” Wentz said. “The church that gave us the Jesuits, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition. This is clearly the ticket. Of course I didn’t know a damn thing about the Catholic church at the time.”
After going through the Rights of Catholic Initiation for Adults, Wentz was baptized last May, not quite knowing what to expect. “I was somewhat surprised that they did not in fact just baptize me and start beating me with rods,” he said. He decided to become a monk not long after his baptism.
There is a catch in all of this, of course. According to Wentz, anyone with outstanding debt cannot become a monk, so as to keep the monastery from becoming an escape for those who, say, owe their souls to Mastercard. Or to their local financial institution. Wentz’s student loans will prevent him from becoming a monk until he pays them off, declares bankruptcy, or receives financial help from the monastery. In the meantime, he plans to work night shifts and probably get a second job in an office or store, which will probably be “non-union, less well-paid, and involve great anxiety on my part,” he said.
Aside from delaying his post-graduation plans, Grinnell College’s contribution to Wentz’s future plans is questionable. As an English major, Wentz has been asked a lot of questions about literature over the past four years. These days he has different answers.
“What is good literature?” he asked rhetorically. “It’s a moot freaking point.”
Simply put, Wentz doesn’t care. “Reading Paradise Lost was kind of cool before I was a Catholic,” Wentz said. “Now, it’s like, ‘Yeah, I could’ve condensed that into like 10 pages of simple teaching instead of going through all that.’”
Furthermore, Wentz doesn’t see literary analysis as being a big part of the monastic life. “It’s hard to bear the banner of secular literature into a monastery. If you do that, you’re not guaranteed to fail, but you’re asking for trouble,” he said.
“I have little respect for the assumption that literature by itself is worthwhile,” he said. “Literature as a tool, it seems, would be useful. And that is precisely how it’s been used for almost 200 years by Catholic writers, as a devotional tool.”
Despite the commitment implied by the decision to make his first post-graduation stop a monastery, there is a certain whimsy in Wentz’s choice to go to New Melleray. Wentz said he enrolled at Grinnell because of its late application deadline (Feb. 2, to be exact). And having wound up in Iowa, Wentz simply went for the closest monastery.
“What do I know? I can’t choose one religious order over another,” he said. “This is good enough for me. If you go to a monastery looking for bells and whistles, you’re already lost.”
“If it’s not the right one for me, then I don’t know which one is,” he said. “That’s what I tell prospies about Grinnell.”
—Amanda Davis
Day in the life of a monk
• 3 a.m.—Rise
• 3:30 a.m.—Vigils
• 4 a.m. to 6:30 a.m.—Scripture/private prayer/breakfast
• 7 a.m.—Mass
• 8 a.m.—Scripture/private prayer (Work)
• 9:30 a.m.—Work
• 12 p.m.—Dinner/ scripture/private prayer (Work)
• 4:30 p.m.—Scripture/private prayer/supper
• 5:30 p.m.—Vespers
• 6 p.m.—Scripture/private prayer (Work)
• 7:20 p.m.—Chapter/Compline
• 9 p.m.— Retire