Richard Telnack had grown up in Detroit, the son of an auto worker, and was studying architecture at The Catholic University of America in the late 1940s. He decided to go on a retreat during Holy Week in 1949, at a recently-founded monastery in Georgia.
Telnack remembers being struck by his first forays into the South, where even water fountains were divided according to color of skin.
He hadn’t intended to join a monastery, but he liked what he experienced of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers during his retreat. He returned later in the year, and when he arrived in Atlanta, he had to take a bus to Conyers, about 45 miles east of the Georgia capital. He remembers finding it odd that some Black passengers were standing in the aisle next to him, even though there were empty seats up front.
“Would you please move up to the front of the bus,” one Black woman asked Telnack. “These seats are our seats.”
“That kind of shook me,” he recalled in an interview for The Merton Annual in 1984. “So, something about the racial conditions in the South is also what influenced my entering [the monastery]."
Telnack went on to become a monk, with the name Fr. Methodius. Having studied architecture, he was a natural to be called upon in assisting the completion of the monastery church [interior shown in photo above]. In particular, Fr. Methodius worked up a redesign of the church’s windows to accommodate a change in the plans for the size of the structure.
Fr. Methodius was largely self-taught in the art of stained-glass windows. Eventually, he worked on designs for other churches in the Atlanta area and beyond, a task that helped support the monastery financially.
Holy Spirit Monastery had been founded in 1944 by monks from Gethsemani near Louisville, Kentucky – the first Trappist foundation in the United States. The monks settled on an old cotton plantation outside of Atlanta for their second monastery.
Thomas Merton – Fr. Louis, in religious life – was a monk at Gethsemani, but was not part of the group that left for Georgia. But his spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, was published in 1948 and became a best-seller.
Just before his priestly ordination in 1957, Fr. Methodius spent several weeks at Gethsemani, studying music, and at that time he met Merton for the first time. Fr. Methodius would return to Gethsemani to visit Merton in the ensuing years.
Church burning
But in 1962, an event took place that eventually would lead Fr. Methodius himself into the public spotlight. In response to a voter-registration effort among Blacks, the Ku Klux Klan torched three Black churches in Augusta, Georgia, burning them to the ground. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which had led the voter registration drive, vowed to rebuild the churches and got baseball legend Jackie Robinson and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to fundraise.
The prior of Holy Spirit volunteered his “artist-in-residence,” Fr. Methodius, to provide the windows for all three churches.
“Methodius quickly built his stained glass pieces utilizing the same techniques and glass he used for the monastery refectory: simple rectangles that allowed for easy construction and painting of civil rights leaders and scripture figures: Jesus and the prophets,” according to the website of the Arabia Mountain National Heritage Area, which is adjacent to the monastery.
Fr. Methodius attended the dedication ceremonies for the new churches in 1963, and Martin Luther King spoke at the event.
“I got to meet him,” the priest said. “I shook his hand and thanked him for being there.”
Throughout the Civil Rights era, several of the Conyers monks took part in demonstrations.
“In 1967, in his simple black and white habit, Methodius and monastic novice Stephen Gosselin demonstrated with 400 others, including Dr. King and Coretta Scott King, marching from Ebenezer Baptist to Georgia’s capitol steps,” said the Arabia Mountain National Heritage Area. “Methodius once again shook Dr. King’s hand.”
“When Dr. King came along he sparked something in everyone,” said Fr. Methodius.
The architecture student-turned monk-turned stained glass artisan also designed the windows for the Lyke House, a Catholic center that serves students at several Historically Black Colleges in Atlanta.
Years later, Fr. Methodius reflected on his art and how created beauty should reflect the truth of the Word of God.
“When I make stained glass, I am not in a verbal mode,” he said in an interview for The Merton Annual in 2005.
It’s a sentiment that would not be surprising for anyone familiar with Trappist monks’ traditional practice of silence.
But Richard Telnack’s story of going from a northern white student shocked by the treatment of Blacks to someone who provided a visual aid for Christian worship in the Black community speaks volumes.
