There are moments in monastic life when the silence you have practiced for decades, the disciplined, structured, rulebound silence of cistersian observance is suddenly shattered and replaced by a different kind of silence altogether.

A silence so dense with divine presence that you cannot move, cannot speak, cannot do anything except remain motionless in awe while God fills the space with a tangibility that transcends everything your 43 years of contemplative prayer ever prepared you to experience.

My name is Father Brendan Osullivan.

I am 68 years old and for the past 43 years I have been a Trappist monk at Mount Meer Abbey in County Waterford, Ireland.

One of the oldest cisters monasteries in the country founded in 1832.

A place of contemplative silence where approximately 25 monks live under the rule of St.

Benedict dedicating our lives to prayer, manual work, and especially to near absolute silence, except during lurggical hours when we chant the psalms in community.

For more than four decades, I have embraced monastic life completely with its rhythms of prayer from 3:15 a.m.

until 8 or p.m.

Its long hours of silence where the only communications permitted are basic gestures or written notes of extreme necessity and its radical separation from the outside world where visitors are welcome for spiritual retreats.

but carefully kept in separate areas from the monks to preserve our contemplative environment.

But during those 43 years, I have also carried a secret weight that no one in the monastic community knew completely.

From my priestly ordination in 1983 until approximately the year 2000 for nearly 17 years, I struggled with severe alcohol addiction that I kept hidden from my brother monks through careful covering behaviors, bottles hidden in remote places of the monastery, elaborate excuses to explain my occasional absences or erratic behaviors, and especially a double spiritual life where externally I participated in all liturgy and communal work while internally I was spiritually empty praying words without real faith chanting psalms without genuine connection to God.

I managed to overcome that addiction in 2000 with help from an alcoholics’s anonymous program I secretly attended in the nearby town of Kapaquinn.

But although my physical sobriety was restored, my spiritual life remained broken, withered, mechanical for the following six years until August 14th, 2006 when during a youth retreat that our monastery organized for Irish and Italian Catholic teenagers.

I briefly met in the closter a 15-year-old Italian boy named Carlo Autis.

after a conversation of barely 10 minutes where I explained in my English with a thick Irish accent the history of the monastery and he listened with unusual attention for an adolescent.

He suddenly hugged me with surprising strength for someone so thin and whispered in my ear in imperfect but understandable English, “Father Brendan, Jesus knows your secret pain.

He forgives you and now he gives back what you lost.

Three days after that embrace on August 17th, 2006, something happened at Mount Meer that had never happened in the 174 years of the monastery’s history.

The usual monastic silence was transformed into a different silence, deeper, so tangible that all 25 monks present during vespers that evening simultaneously experienced what I can only describe as divine presence so overwhelming that we completely suspended the planned liturgy and remained in absolute silent adoration for two hours without anyone moving a muscle.

And when that presence finally dissipated, we all knew without need for words that something had changed, not only in the monastery, but especially in me, the marked monk who had been embraced by a holy teenager three days earlier.

This is the story of how a dying 15-year-old saint visited an Irish Trappist monastery, embraced a secretly broken monk, and three days later triggered a mystical experience so profound that 18 years later, we still speak of Carlos silence.

The day God visited Mount Meer in such a tangible way that all we could do was remain motionless in his presence.

To understand what Carlo Acudis’ embrace meant to me and what happened 3 days later in our monastery choir, you need to understand who I was on August 14th, 2006.

a 49-year-old Trappist monk who had spent 23 years in monastic life, but who had been spiritually dead inside for most of those years, maintaining perfect external observance while experiencing complete internal emptiness.

I was born in 1956 in County Cork, Ireland to a traditional Irish Catholic family.

My father was a school teacher.

My mother raised six children with the kind of practical piety characteristic of rural Irish Catholicism in the 1950s and60s.

We attended mass every Sunday, prayed the rosary as a family and maintained devotion to local saints.

But our faith was more cultural inheritance than personal conviction.

I entered Mount Meer Abbey in 1981 at age 25, not because of any dramatic conversion or mystical calling, but because I was a serious introspective young man who felt drawn to the contemplative life’s promise of peace, order, and closeness to God.

The Trappist life appealed to me.

The structure, the silence, the separation from the world’s chaos, the rhythm of lurggical prayer punctuating each day.

My novicate years 1981 to 1983 were genuinely spiritual.

I experienced God’s presence in the silence, felt consolation during the long hours of lectio deina sacred reading, and found joy in the communal chanting of the divine office.

I was ordained to the priesthood 1983, took my solemn vows, and settled into what I expected would be a lifetime of growing closer to God through contemplative prayer and monastic discipline.

But something went wrong that I still don’t fully understand.

Perhaps it was the weight of priestly responsibility.

Perhaps it was undiagnosed depression.

Perhaps it was simply spiritual warfare.

But within months of my ordination, I began experiencing what mystics call spiritual dryness.

The sense that God had withdrawn, that prayer was hitting a ceiling, that the presence I had felt during the visi had evaporated.

At first I fought it through increased prayer and penance.

But the dryness persisted and in my desperation to feel something, anything.

I made the disastrous decision that would shape the next 17 years of my life.

I started drinking.

Alcohol was available at Mount Meer as it is in most monasteries.

We produced some wine for lurggical use and we kept a small supply of spirits for medicinal purposes and for offering hospitality to visitors.

But Trappist monks are expected to be temperate, moderate in all things.

I was not moderate.

I was desperate.

and alcohol provided what prayer no longer did.

A temporary sense of warmth, connection, relief from the crushing emptiness I felt.

It started small.

A glass of wine after complin prayer taken alone in my cell to help me sleep.

Then it escalated.

Wine before meals.

Spirits hidden in my cell.

bottles cashed in remote areas of our extensive monastery grounds where I could drink without being observed.

I became expert at hiding my addiction.

Trappist monks live in structured community but with significant private time for prayer and work.

I use that privacy to drink.

I became skilled at appearing sober during communal activities even when I wasn’t.

I developed elaborate systems for disposing of empty bottles.

I invented excuses for why I might smell of alcohol or appear slightly unsteady.

For 17 years, 1983 to 2000, I maintained this double life.

Externally, I was faithful Trappist monk, attending all seven daily offices, vigils at 3:15 a.m.

, lords, tur, sexed, none, vespers, complainant, participating in manual labor, keeping silence, observing the rule of benedict.

Internally, I was spiritually dead alcoholic, going through motions, praying words without meaning, chanting psalms without connection to God, celebrating mass while feeling nothing.

The worst part wasn’t the drinking itself.

It was the spiritual death that both caused and was caused by the drinking.

I had entered monastic life to find God.

Instead, I had lost him completely, and the silence that was supposed to be space for encountering divine presence had become empty void that I filled with alcohol because I couldn’t bear the nothingness.

By the late 1990s, my addiction was becoming harder to hide.

My health was deteriorating.

My participation in communal activities was increasingly erratic.

Several brother monks expressed concern, though they attributed my problems to illness or exhaustion rather than suspecting alcoholism.

In 1999, I had what alcoholics call a moment of clarity.

I was alone in one of our monasteries outlying fields, drunk at 10 or a.m.

, and I realized I’m going to die like this.

Either the alcohol will kill me physically, or the spiritual death I’m experiencing will destroy whatever remains of my vocation.

I didn’t know where to turn.

I couldn’t confess to my abbott.

I was too ashamed, too afraid of being expelled from the monastery.

I couldn’t confess to my spiritual director.

I had been lying to him for years about the state of my soul.

I couldn’t confess to my brother monks.

The shame was too crushing.

So I did something I had never done before.

I sought help outside the monastery.

In January 2000, I began secretly attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in Capacin, the nearest town to Mount Meer.

I would tell my superiors I needed to go to town for medical appointments or monastery business, and instead I would attend AA meetings.

The people in that AA group, workingclass Irish men and women with their own addiction stories, saved my life.

They taught me that addiction is disease, not moral failure.

They taught me the 12 steps.

They taught me that recovery requires rigorous honesty and daily surrender.

By June 2000, I was sober.

I have remained sober since then, 24 years as of this writing.

I continued attending AA meetings secretly for several years, gradually transitioning my recovery work into prayer and spiritual direction within the monastery.

But here’s the devastating truth that no one understood, including myself, for many years.

While I achieved physical sobriety in 2000, I did not achieve spiritual recovery.

I stopped drinking, but I didn’t recover my relationship with God.

From 2000 to 2006, 6 years of physical sobriety.

I continued experiencing the same spiritual dryness that had driven me to alcohol in the first place.

I prayed the hours faithfully.

I participated in all communal activities.

I maintained perfect external observance.

But inside I felt nothing.

Prayer was mechanical recitation.

The eukarist I celebrated daily was ritual performed correctly but without consolation or presence.

The silence that surrounded my life was empty rather than full.

not pregnant with divine mystery but simply void.

I began to believe that this was my permanent state that my 17 years of addiction had so damaged my spiritual capacity that I would never again experience God’s presence.

That I was condemned to spend the rest of my life going through monastic motions while spiritually dead inside.

I developed a kind of resigned despair.

I would remain externally faithful to my vows because I had nowhere else to go and because the structure of monastic life was all I knew.

But I had given up hope of ever feeling God’s presence again.

This was who I was on August 14th, 2006.

a 49-year-old Trappist monk with 23 years of monastic profession, six years of sobriety from alcohol and complete spiritual emptiness that I had learned to hide from everyone around me just as effectively as I had once hidden my drinking.

I was the broken monk, the marked monk, the monk who had lost God in the silence and didn’t know how to find him again.

August 14th, 2006 was the somnity of the assumption of Mary.

Mount Meer was hosting a three-day youth retreat for approximately 30 Irish and Italian Catholic teenagers.

An unusual activity for our strictly contemplative monastery, but one our abbot, Father Colum, had approved as a form of evangelization consistent with our cistersian carrorism.

The retreat had begun on Friday, August 11th.

Most participants were Irish teenagers from local parishes in Cork and Waterford, but there was also a small group from Italy, about eight young people who had come specifically because their parish priest knew our abbot and had arranged for them to experience Irish monastic spirituality.

As a professed monk and ordained priest, I was assigned various small tasks to support the retreat.

Leading some prayer times, helping supervise manual work in our monastery farm, and giving tours of our historic buildings to interested participants.

On Monday morning, August 14th, I was assigned to give a cloister tour to a small group of five Italian teenagers who had expressed particular interest in monastic architecture and history.

My English is fluent, but with a very thick Irish accent that many foreigners find difficult to understand.

So, I spoke slowly using simple vocabulary.

The group included four boys and one girl, all approximately 14- 16 years old.

One of the boys caught my attention immediately, not because of anything he said or did, but because of how he looked.

He was noticeably thin, pale, with deep shadows under his eyes.

He looked sick, genuinely ill.

He wore jeans and a simple t-shirt with a computer image printed on it.

The casual clothing of a modern teenager, not what I typically associated with young people interested in monasticism.

as I explain the history of Mount Meer, founded in 1832 by Irish Cistersian monks who had been exiled to France during religious persecution and then returned to establish this abbey.

This thin, pale boy listened with unusual attention, occasionally asking intelligent questions in surprisingly good English.

Father, how many monks live here now? 25 brothers, I responded.

And they all keep silence all the time.

I mostly.

We speak only during community meetings or when absolutely necessary.

The rest is silence and prayer.

Is the silence difficult? he asked with genuine curiosity.

Rather than the skepticism I often heard from young people at first, yes, but after years the silence becomes a gift.

It’s where we hear God most clearly.

The boy nodded thoughtfully.

Then he introduced himself.

My name is Carlo.

Carlo Audis.

I’m from Milan.

Pleased to meet you, Carlo.

I’m Father Brendan O’Sullivan.

Father Brendan, can I ask you something personal? I was surprised by the directness of his question.

You can ask, I may not answer.

Do you hear God in the silence? Really? The question struck me like a physical blow because it touched exactly my secret wound.

I maintained the silence.

I participated in the liturgies.

I fulfilled all my monastic obligations.

But had I heard God in the silence for years? No, not really.

Prayer was mechanical, not communication.

Observance was duty, not relationship.

I tried to listen.

I responded evasively, but sometimes it’s difficult.

Carlo looked at me with eyes that seemed to see far more than a 15-year-old should be able to see.

And then he said something that made my heart stop.

Father, I know about the alcohol and I know about the emptiness you feel even though you stopped drinking 6 years ago.

Jesus showed me.

I felt as if someone had punched me in the stomach.

What? How do you I’m dying, father.

Leukemia.

Probably have weeks left, maybe months if I’m fortunate.

And during this time, God is showing me things about people.

Showing me so I can help them.

The other four teenagers in the tour group had moved ahead to examine a statue of the Virgin Mary in one of the closter aloves.

Carlo and I were slightly behind them.

Our conversation momentarily private.

You were an alcoholic for 17 years, Carlo continued in a low voice.

From 1983 to 2000, you hid it well.

Very well.

No one knew.

But it destroyed your interior life.

And even though you’ve been sober for 6 years, you haven’t recovered your connection with God.

You go through the motions.

You pray the hours.

You celebrate mass.

But you don’t feel anything.

You think God abandoned you because of your past sins.

You think the spiritual dryness is permanent punishment.

Tears began streaming down my face.

I couldn’t help it.

How? How do you know all this? I’ve never told anyone.

Because Jesus told me.

He showed me your story.

And he sent me here specifically to this monastery on this day to tell you something you need to hear.

He never abandoned you.

He was with you even during your worst years.

Even when you were drunk and desparing, even when you felt completely cut off from him.

And he forgives you completely.

Not partially, not conditionally, completely.

But I’m I’m still empty inside.

I don’t feel his presence.

I pray, but it’s just words.

That’s why I’m here, Carlos said with gentle firmness.

Jesus wants to restore what was lost.

The dryness, the emptiness, it’s ending very soon, within days.

And then Carlo did something completely unexpected in a monastic context where physical contact between monks and visitors is minimal and carefully regulated.

He stepped forward and hugged me.

Not a brief polite embrace, a full strong hug that lasted perhaps 10 seconds.

And while he held me, he whispered in my ear in his imperfect but understandable English, “Father Brendan, Jesus knows your secret pain.

He forgives you completely.

And now he gives back what you lost.

Your life in God, it’s being restored right now, starting now.

” When Carlo released me, the other four teenagers had returned from examining the statue.

The tour continued normally.

I showed them the chapter house, the refactory, the scriptorum, explaining our daily routine and the history of cistersian spirituality.

Carlo asked occasional questions, always intelligent and engaged, but made no further personal comments.

The tour ended after about 45 minutes.

The group thanked me and returned to their retreat activities.

I went to my assigned manual labor, working in the monastery vegetable garden, but I couldn’t concentrate.

My hands moved through familiar motions of weeding and watering, but my mind was completely absorbed by what had just happened.

How had Carlo known about my alcoholism, about the 17 years of hidden addiction, about my continued spiritual dryness despite six years of sobriety? These were details I had never shared with anyone.

Not my habit, not my spiritual director, not my AA sponsor.

How could a 15-year-old Italian boy I had just met know my deepest secrets? And more troubling, what did he mean when he said my spiritual restoration was starting now, that within days the emptiness would end? How could he promise something like that? The youth retreat continued through Tuesday and Wednesday, August 15, 16.

I saw Carlo occasionally at a distance during communal meals and prayer times, but we didn’t speak again privately.

He appeared to be enjoying the retreat.

I saw him laughing with other teenagers, participating in work projects, attending our liturgies with obvious reverence.

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