Beth Salerno

Waegwan Abbey: Background and Stories

April 17, 2008 Author: Beth Salerno

Waegwan is a small but rapidly growing town, about 2 ½ hours southwest of Seoul and one hour north of Busan.  The Abbey backs up against the U.S. military base Camp Carroll, where the few remaining German monks sometimes eat breakfast.  There is a 1909 Catholic church and about 15 other buildings.  There used to be a large, welcoming chapel, but a catastrophic fire on Good Friday last year burned the chapel and half the monastery building.  While no one was hurt, the abbey is scarred and the gardens have given way to ripped earth and twisted concrete.  Daily prayers are sung against the rhythm of a pile driver breaking up concrete foundations. 

When I arrived at Waegwan, I was a bit overwhelmed by my own unconscious assumptions.  Even though I had read about Waegwan’s growth and success, I expected a small place like Saint Anselm.  Physically, it is smaller than campus, but its reach is international and its outlook is global.  The monks are part of the Ottilian branch of the Benedictine family (there are 21 branches). The missionary vision of that house infuses life at Waegwan.  Abbot Simon Ri kindly explained the history of the place, mentioning visits with two Popes, annual travels to European conferences, and work with the government in China.  This fall, Waegwan will host the international gathering of Benedictine Catholic abbots.  Even after 8 months in Korea, I had ignorantly assumed a Korean monastery would be somehow “underdeveloped,” regional, limited.  Instead Korean seminaries are packed, graduating 150-180 priests a year, and Waegwan exports gold vessels for mass, stained glass, Catholic publications, and even monks.  In addition, there are more than 500 oblates (lay people pledging a vow to a monastery) at Waegwan with hundreds on a waiting list.

My experiences with Benedictines suggest that prayer, food and hospitality, not always in that order, are central aspects of Benedictine life.  Here are three stories about those things at Waegwan:

A petite Korean woman in a polyester warm up suit and purple high top sneakers entered the chapel.  She sat with 20 other women and a few men, all on retreat.  There were 55 monks at the front of the room, in six long lines.  A few were German, white faces amid Koreans. The monks ranged in age from early twenties to late seventies.  Two whole rows of monks looked like a college basketball team. 

Vespers on Friday night, followed by Compline.  Matins Saturday morning.  Midday mass on Saturday, then Vespers Saturday night.  Matins Sunday morning.  We followed the traditional Benedictine rhythms, singing the psalms, hearing Bible readings, standing, bowing, sitting, standing, bowing.  My legs burned from the exercise, but I realized it was keeping me awake and alert despite the earliness or lateness of the hour.  When mass began, the polyester and high-top wearing woman reached into her purse and pulled out a delicate lace “mantilla”.  Carefully she covered her head.  As if snow had started to fall in the chapel, white lace coverings fluttered onto dark heads bowed in prayer.  A few younger women sat uncovered, but even they never crossed their legs.  While the head covering may be an imported western tradition, the other is pure Confucianism.  A respectful Korean never crosses their legs before their elders, or apparently before God.  The prayer began.  “Aboji,…” Aboji means Father.  It is one of the few Korean words that sounds anything like Latin - Abba, Abbot, Father.  I wonder if this is a coincidence.

After almost every prayer service there was a meal.  I ate alone or with one monk in the guest house dining room.  My guide and dinner companion was Brother Luke, who also oversees the kitchens.  Fresh-baked white bread, orange slices of cheese in plastic, homemade strawberry jam, and hot frothing milk arrived with every meal.  These seemed to be standard fare, not chosen for the visiting American.  At my first meal enough food arrived to feed 6.  Gradually the portions were scaled back but I still left more food than I ate.  When Korean and Benedictine hospitality meet, it is a formidable event.

Let me stress here, that I still look the way most of you remember me. I am 15 pounds lighter and my hair is longer, but as you can see from the pictures on flickr.com,  I look like me.  This will be relevant in a minute.

At the last service of my last day, I was the only non-monk in the chapel.  All the retreat participants had gone home.  The only non-monk, the only woman, the only foreigner - I was definitely wondering if I had read the program wrong and broken some rule!  But no one asked me to leave.  After the last prayer finished and all but one monk had left, I headed for the exit.  The last monk asked me to wait.  Each day he had brought me a prayer book, with each song and reading marked with a series of ribbons.  He did not seem to notice that I never turned pages when everyone else did, or that I did not sing.  I was still reading line one when the monks responded to line seven, and it took two days for me to puzzle out the Korean word for “prayer’.  Yet today he had seemed terribly startled when he handed me the prayerbook.  I had worried about it during the entire service.

“Will you be joining us for prayer every day?” he asked in English.  “No I have to leave today,” I answered.  “Thank you for preparing the prayer book for me.”  “Ah,” he said, looking suddenly embarassed, “I thought you were Korean.” 

Welcoming the stranger as Christ and the American as Korean - that is _really_ Benedictine hospitality.

Entry Filed under: religion, Food, Culture