Tower Topics ~ Fall 2000

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Two monks make solemn profession

“Receive me, Lord, as you have promised, and I shall live;
let me not be disappointed.”

After exchanging these words in Latin chant with their fellow monks, Brother Frowin Reed and Brother Jeremiah Tuttle lay face-down on the floor of the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception and were covered with a massive black and white funeral pall. From the north tower a bell tolled.

When they emerged from their “mystic burial” 10 minutes later, the two monks were symbolically resurrected into a new life as solemnly professed monks of Conception Abbey.

The Aug. 27 Mass marked the first Rite of Solemn Profession in six years at Conception, and the more than 200 guests on hand witnessed one of the Benedictine order’s most sacred rituals. The rite celebrates a monk’s permanent commitment to the community. It follows three stages of lesser commitment – an in-definite postulancy, a yearlong novitiate and simple vows, which usually cover a period of three years.

“Awake now, O sleeper, rise from the dead,” the monks sang as the funeral pall was lifted. “The Christ is to come as your dawning. Far gone is the night, comes daylight instead; attend to the solemn warning. Cast off your slumbers, all that encumbers: put on the Lord’s cloudless morning.”

After the abbot cloaked the two men in the “cuculla,” a black garment that symbolizes their profession, each solemnly professed monk in the community then gave Brother Frowin, 26, and Brother Jeremiah, 49, the kiss of peace, sealing their permanent fraternity in the community.

Brother Frowin’s journey toward monastic life took a detour following his mother’s sudden death just before his graduation from high school. A young man who’d been active in youth ministry and whom many had pegged as a future priest, he quit attending Mass and began avoiding people from his old youth group.

But Bishop Anthony O’Connell, who’d befriended Brother Frowin through the young man’s youth ministry, didn’t let him off easy.

“I remember he told me that I was acting like I hated God,” Brother Frowin recalled. “He said if I hated something so much there must be something there.” The bishop then reminded the future monk that he’d done much good work half-heartedly. “Imagine what would happen if you did it whole-heartedly,” the bishop said.

At the bishop’s urging, Brother Frowin enrolled at Conception Seminary College. He was immediately impressed by the brotherhood he witnessed among the monks. He entered the monastery at the end of his sophomore year.

“Prayer is very important to me, but it’s the men of this community that drew me here,” Brother Frowin said. “I see them acting out what they’ve prayed. Like any strong religious experience, this is an acting out of prayer. I am by no means successful at it, but I’m learning.”

The first time Brother Jeremiah saw Conception Abbey he was driving from the west on Highway VV.

“I had to pull off the road and just sit and look,” he remembers. “I just knew this was right for me.”

That moment was the culmination of a two-decade search for spiritual peace, in which he dabbled in New Age mysticism and Eastern religion before eventually converting to Catholicism.

Brother Jeremiah, who was raised in the Protestant tradition of the Church of the Brethren, first experienced monasticism while touring a Trappist monastery in Snowmass, Colo., during a vacation in the mid-1970s.

“I experienced an awakening,” he recalls. “The monks were singing the Divine Office and I’d never heard anything more beautiful. I stayed in the chapel for a couple of hours, while my friend patiently waited in the car.

“I didn’t want to leave” Brother Jeremiah said. “But my friend ever so gently reminded me that I wasn’t Catholic and that I should probably do that first.”

Brother Jeremiah entered the Catholic Church in 1992.

Three years later he traded a “solid career, a nice car and a wallet full of plastic” for the black habit and strict discipline of Conception.

Abbot Gregory Polan, in his “admonition,” which is part of the Rite of Solemn Profession, told Brother Frowin and Brother Jeremiah that “this day should be the most joyful and liberating day of your life.”

“On this day you are committed, there is no turning back,” he said. “The future remains uncertain. But you have placed your whole life into the hands of a loving and compassionate God who has graciously brought you to this moment.”

The abbot compared them to the Apostles who accepted the challenges of following Jesus.

“Some have found St. Benedict’s teachings too demanding. But for you it has been different,” he said. “Through the teachings of St. Benedict, you take upon yourselves the way of obedience, which is the way of Christ, who emptied himself so that he might be filled with divine glory. That is the promise which Christ holds out to you today. You should not offer your life for anything less.”

Abbot Gregory Polan reads the closing prayer at
an August 14 ceremony in which Carl Weckenmann
and Floy Guitierrez entered Conception Abbey's
novitiate. Novice master Bro. Bernard Montgomery
looks on. After one year, the two novices may ask
to make their simple vows.

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