Answering the Call, Fr. Francis Kline OCSO
The following is an excerpt from Fr. Francis Kline’s monastic autobiography, written in 1987, three years before he was elected Mepkin Abbey’s third Abbot. In it, he describes his struggle to answer the call to a religious life and the call to be an accomplished musical artist. Fr. Francis discovered that music and monastic practice were not mutually exclusive but could instead enrich each other. His unique ability to combine artistry with spirituality became a hallmark of his vocation, inspiring others and solidifying his place as both a religious leader and a steward of a musical tradition.
When I was a boy of thirteen, and in the eighth grade, the final year of grammar school, I felt the call from God to enter the seminary. I suppose it was an undifferentiated call that specified no particular order or community. At any rate, I had only a few vague leads as to where I should go. I was in a quandary. Here I was at an important fork in the road of my life; I wanted to go the way of God but had no idea how to flesh out that inclination. I wanted art, and I wanted God. I had been taught that the two went together by an extraordinary woman who was my first music teacher, my first mentor, and the inspiration of my young life. My parents only wanted what I wanted. I was at a loss. One day after Mass (I attended Mass daily), I went to pray at the shrine of the Infant of Prague in the basement of our church. I was in a state of real anxiety brought on by crippling indecision. I wanted an answer. I wanted light. And so, I asked Our Lord quite simply for guidance. I tried to give myself, to surrender myself completely to a priestly vocation. But I got no answer, no inspiration or enlightenment. In these weeks, I felt myself to be a sort of cue ball on a billiard table, falling ultimately and inevitably into a side pocket. In this case, it was my family, who, having consulted the pastor, were advised to send me to the
Jesuit Prep school in Philadelphia to foster a possible priestly vocation. The pastor finished the business when he told me to stop worrying, that if God wanted me to be a priest, he would call me more clearly after graduation from high school.
Those high school years were filled with a tremendous amount of activity, but looking back on it now from my present perspective, I see that only two things really
happened. And those two developments can adequately describe those years. I learned to trust in God and to build a rich and full life around Him. I attended daily Mass, and I procured an abridged breviary and prayed the office. After school, I rushed to the Church to practice. My rule was simple–whenever there was a free moment, I went to the chapel to pray. Before any class or activity, I practiced mindfulness of God. I was very strict with my appetites. I fasted often and became thin through puberty. I had achieved a kind of balance between life in God and life in artistic and intellectual activity. One seemed to be woven into the other in a cohesive pattern. I chose not God, but found Him in the activity I had chosen, but all the while feeling that I had not faced squarely the issue of God. I had put it on hold because I could see no way of responding to it. I could see myself as a musical artist, with no ceiling to my artistic endeavors, enfolded comfortably within the Church. Would this not be my natural vision, considering the life I was leading?
Either you consigned yourself to deserved musical oblivion as a priest or religious, or you sought out your God in the pursuit of excellence in the highest musical endeavor. I listened to the voices that said, “You cannot not think of music school.” I blew out my candle and went to New York to study music. And I was thoroughly convinced of the rightness of what I had done.
I went to New York to sing and make music for the Lord. What actually took place inside of me was the search for the face of God. “Of you, my heart has spoken: ‘Seek his face. It is your face, O lord, that I seek: Hide not your face.”
My first years at Juilliard were spent molding my musical personality. For whatever reason, I laid low in New York. I found myself among a roster of very brilliant students. I gladly took my place at the end of such a line of players. I felt honored to be one of them, and I still feel so. As it was, I did not emerge from my shell until the end of my third year. The catalyst was a remarkable concert by a musician of deep sensitivity. It was an all-Bach program on the organ at the recital hall at Juilliard. Bach was revealed to me that night. He called to me and granted me the inspiration to understand him. Why, if I enjoyed Bach this much, should I not do all of it? And so, I began to prepare what would be a full season of concerts encompassing all of the then-known organ works of Bach–over 200 compositions.
The Bach concert series was to prove a turning point in my religious life, but not of itself. There was another factor that had entered the scene very much in the course of my musical career, which, in conjunction with the Bach series, was to prove decisive for my monastic vocation.
It was during my second year in New York, when my habits of laziness and leisure were fully indulged, that I auditioned and obtained the position of organist at St Kilian’s Church on Long Island, a very large Catholic Parish with an amazingly good music program. And there began my re-education in religion, many memorable musical moments, and the making of life-time friends. For one thing, the job required my entire weekend, which kept me mercifully absent from New York parties. Instead, I spent my time practicing, teaching, and playing services. I lived out on the Island as a weekend monk.
It was my sixth year in New York. I had left Juilliard the year before, but I was still at St. Kilian’s. My Bach series in Philadelphia was about half over. It was a cloudy day, December 7, 1971. I was thumbing through a book in my room at the parish. We had a concert that day in the city with the boys’ choir. I was tired, but not bodily tired. It was a fatigue of the spirit. Like a dog chasing its tail in an endless circle, I was chasing the muse of music to catch her finally in an embrace to force her to yield up to me her meaning. She always alluded me. Restless, always in need of a break, but never knowing where to go or what to do to refresh my spirit, I looked at the book on the table about the Trappist monastery, Our Lady of Gethsemani. I was looking at the pictures of the monastery and its farmlands. There it was, the land, the farm, the awkward buildings, and more land and trees and grass. Here was a place soothing to a tormented heart. Here was a place of healing and not of wounding, of resolution, not of dissonance. It was the land, the exile, and the rest that I wanted. God, I had already wanted. But I could not find the place. Finally, I had found the place. I had found the place where God would reveal his face to me. But could I do without music indefinitely? No, I could not. But I must break my professionalism, my technique. No, I would recede to the vanishing point. And when it was all gone through atrophy, I would tinker around at the keyboard for my psyche’s sake and give glory to God.
By May, I had been accepted at the monastery and had fixed June 12 as my entry date. I kept hoping I would break a leg or something so that I would not be able to finish my Bach series. And then felt myself to be fixed, as the weeks wore on and it looked like I would finish it, to some moving track that pursued its own inexorable course. Yes, I would finish that concert series not by my design but according to the will of some higher Intelligence, which, of course, I could not understand.
I lived and breathed that music for three full years between preparation and two full performances and one complete recording. I still thrill at the thought of what it was like to explore that world where every conceivable sound was worked through Bach’s mind and fingers. You go forever onward, richer and poorer for the experience. It brought me to a threshold of a wider life, and the boundary was where music stops and something else begins. Of what, I am still not exactly sure. It was not simply another career differing from music. I was not living simply without music, as if this abstinence alone would win for me spiritual experience. It was something else– a wound received through Bach’s sublime music which can never be healed–an experience achieved through God and offered back to God (for it is too precious to keep for oneself). And God accepted it.
God accepted my Bach concerts. And there was nothing else to do but go away and be poor and ponder it in my heart. So many things fall into place in my life in the monastery when I have used this lens on my memory. So much joy and gratitude fills my mind when I reflect on the simple truth of my life a simple and unifying gift (for I had poured everything of my idealistic youth into those concerts) given to me by God and offered by me back to him.
Fr. Kline served as Mepkin’s Abbot for sixteen years (1990-2006). He died on August 27, 2006, following a four-year struggle with chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. He was fifty-seven years old.
