By God’s design: Trappist reflects on life of prayer, art, and marching for justice

Perhaps it runs in the family: Two brothers from Detroit ended up in very different places but exercised the talent they shared in the field of design.

While Jack Telnack became famous for his design of the Ford Taurus, his older brother, Richard, studied architecture and became a celebrated craftsman of stained-glass windows. 

But while Jack became a vice president at Ford and eventually was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame, Richard became a Trappist monk, living in relative obscurity in a rural area outside of Atlanta. As a monk, he took the name Methodius -- a nod to the family’s Slovak heritage. The 9th-century Sts. Cyril and Methodius, known as the Apostles to the Slavs, evangelized areas north of the Byzantine Empire, which are parts of Eastern Europe today.

In a sense, Fr. Methodius Telnack his been a missionary as well -- living out his life as a Catholic priest in the Bible Belt, praying and working for change in a part of the country where the greater society clung to its racial prejudices for decades. 

Now 97, Fr. Methodius is the last of the original monks who constructed the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia. He has been a Trappist monk for 76 years.

Today, when he is not chanting the Office with the 22 other monks at Holy Spirit Monastery, he spends much of his time reading great works of literature. 

Richard and Jack Telnack grew up in a Catholic family. A cousin was mother general of the Sisters of Sts. Cyril and Methodius in Danville, Pennsylvania. In fact, her name was Mother Cyril. So between her and Fr. Methodius, the family has honored the Apostles to the Slavs. 

In 1946, Richard enlisted in the Marines and “got through” basic training at Parris Island, in South Carolina. 

His military service took him to China -- at that time in the midst of a civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists. The Marines were there to help repatriate Japanese and Koreans who remained on the mainland after the Second World War (Japan had occupied much of China during the war). Telnack served in supporting roles at an airbase 11 miles south of Beijing. He was fascinated by the sites he was able to view on his off days, including the Forbidden Palace and Temple of Heaven. 

In addition to the latter -- a Ming Dynasty-era complex of religious buildings -- Telnack was able to visit a different kind of “Temple of Heaven” -- a Trappist monastery that the French had founded in Beijing. Most of Chinese culture is not dairy-oriented, but these monks had a dairy operation and sold milk to support themselves.

“I can still see the little bottles” with “Trappist” printed on them. 

The monastery has since relocated to Hong Kong.

But entering a monastery was perhaps the farthest thing from the young marine’s mind.

Telnack had planned to take advantage of the GI Bill and study architecture when he completed his military service; he had his sights set on a school in Switzerland. But in Beijing, he met an archaeologist and his wife who had ties to his native Detroit. They convinced him to study in America instead. 

So he enrolled at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and it was there that he made a quick decision one evening that set his life on a new course. Meeting a friend at a “hangout” near campus, he found the friend writing a postcard. 

“I had no idea there was a monastery down here,” Fr. Methodius recalled.

The retreat, which took place during Holy Week in 1949, had an impact on him. “I liked what I saw,” he told Victor A. Kramer, one of the founders of the International Thomas Merton Society, in 1984. 

The young architecture student ended up entering the monastery on the feast of the Assumption in 1949 -- at the age of 21. 

By that time, Telnack was exposed to the mistreatment Black people continued to endure in the South -- 86 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Even on his way to Parris Island, he was stunned to see signs in public facilities indicating that some drinking fountains were for “colored” and others for whites. And on his way to the monastery as a retreatant, he had to take a bus from Atlanta about 45 miles east, to Conyers. 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 woman asked Telnack. “These seats are our seats.”

The experiences were influential in his decision to be a monk in Georgia. “I just wanted to be down here where I might be able to help with the situation,” he said. 

By the time the Civil Rights movement was in full swing during the 1960s, Fr. Methodius and a novice received permission to go outside of the monastery in order to join a march for equal rights. Wearing their Trappist habits, they followed the protesters from Martin Luther King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to the state capitol. 

When Telnack entered the monastery  in 1949, five years after it was founded, there were a few structures for living and simple worship, but work on the church had been delayed for lack of funds. By 1952, though, building could begin. 

Fr. Methodius and the other monks were involved in implementing the architectural plans, including demolition and pouring concrete. But when the architect left, Fr. Methodius, with his training from Catholic University, took on a new role. As the church structure rose, the abbot and others realized how high it would be -- too high, they felt.

“I was able to take 10 feet out of the clerestory and then change a lot of the window details,” Fr. Methodius recalled in the interview with Victor Kramer. 

Traditionally, Cistercians have not used stained glass, but the Georgia monastery received an exemption from that rule. As the church neared completion, the abbot general of the Trappist order worldwide, Dom Gabriel Sortais, paid a visit. He had just been in Africa, but the summer heat in Georgia was almost unbearable. 

Fr. Methodius had already taken an interest in glass and was teaching himself and getting advice from experts, especially from the Blenko Glass Co. in West Virginia, who would become the monastery’s supplier. He was given the go-ahead to begin work on the windows, assisted by a novice who had studied at an art school in Los Angeles and a priest who had artistic ability. 

From this experience evolved a monastery workshop that could take on commissions from other churches. Beginning in 1957 and lasting several decades, the Stained Glass Shop at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit made windows for churches throughout the American Southeast.

In 1963, when three African American churches in Augusta, Georgia, were burned down by the Ku Klux Klan in response to a Black voter registration drive, the abbot of Holy Spirit volunteered Fr. Methodius as designer of the windows for the rebuilt churches. 

“I went down there for the dedication,” the priest recalled. And he met Martin Luther King at the event. 

Fr. Methodius not only was an artist in glass, he was also a musical composer. Even before the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council era, he felt that more of the vernacular language should be used in Mass. Again, he looked to his patron saint, Methodius, who, he said, brought the vernacular to the Slavs.

In 1957, Fr. Methodius spent eight weeks at the monastery in Gethsemani in Kentucky, the monastery from which Holy Spirit was founded, for a class taught by a French Benedictine expert on Gregorian chant. It was during this time that he first met Thomas Merton -- known in monastic life as Fr. Louis.

Ironically, he told Aleteia, he has never read Merton’s autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, which became an almost-instant bestseller when it was published in 1948, the year before Fr. Methodius entered the monastery. 

Fr. Methodius would visit Merton many times before the author-monk’s tragic death in 1968. “He was very real,” Fr. Methodius recalled. “You’d never think of him as pious. … He was a good conversationalist. There was back and forth in our conversation, not just me listening to him.”

In his project to bring more vernacular into the liturgy, he thought about writing English lyrics to the Gregorian melodies. “I explained to Thomas Merton what my ideas were,” and, Fr. Methodius told Aleteia. “He said, ‘Write new melodies. Don't use the old melodies. Do something different.’”

In the end, he said, he used melodic lines -- to “give a simple yet strong melody, and be easy to sing.”

And, as the monks continue to pray in a church illuminated through Fr. Methodius’ stained-glass windows, they also continue using the melodies he composed, to raise their voices in prayer and praise.