Seven years ago, a Vietnamese Abbott and his translator—a refugee from Vietnam—travelled to the Ozarks to learn how the monks in Assumption Abbey near Ava lived. And they discovered that the Ozarks monks had a problem: their numbers were dwindling, and the future of the monastery looked bleak.
So the Vietnamese Abbott sent some of his monks over to help Assumptions Abbey. Gradually they began to help run the guesthouse and bake the abbey’s famous fruitcakes. And in August, the American monks gave Assumption Abbey to the Vietnamese monastery in exchange for the promise that the new owners would keep the Ozarks mountain sanctuary alive.
KSMU interviewed Father Cyprian Harrison, one of the three remaining American monks at the abbey.
“Well, we're complex so there's always mixed emotions: a sense of regret that we were not able to continue making it ourselves, on our own. But mostly gratitude and, sort of, a sense of wonder of how this has really worked,” Harrison said.
On a lighter note, he said this arrangement has been compared to a “Hail Mary” pass in a football game.
“Time is running out. You're behind, and so the quarterback decides to throw a very high, strong, long pass into the end zone. He has his receiver tear out in that direction. He throws a pass and he prays a Hail Mary that he might catch it and cross the goal line and win the game,” Harrison said.
Harrison is a Trappist monk. The Vietnamese monastery is now of the Cistercian order. Both are reforms of the Benedictine Order in which monks live a life of contemplative prayer and work to support themselves.
Harrison said Assumption Abbey will continue to produce and sell its famous fruitcakes. In recent years, the bakery has sent more than 20,000 fruitcakes a year from its kitchens in rural, south-central Missouri to customers around the world.