Brother Dennis Butler, O. Praem.
-Interview conducted by Stephen Gaertner, O. Praem.
Recently, I sat down with Brother Dennis Butler, a former Trappist monk and successful business executive, to ask him a few questions about his daily life as a Norbertine at Santa Maria de la Vid Priory: he was not shy about his responses. Here’s a look at some of them . . . .
Well, I wake up before the alarm at five-thirty, go to church at twenty after six, set up for morning prayer, try to pray; my mind is not fully awake at that time of day. After Mass I go and work in my office for about an hour because I can’t eat that early. After that, I go and give Vincent [a retired member of the community] his pills. I also sort them, get them refilled. Around nine I go eat something, go back to my office. I do tithing on my computer, making out checks and letters, who gets what, over the ten month pay period. I do a lot of jobs for Joel [the Prior] . . . lots of brochures. RCIA [Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults] needs adequate preparation. The martyrology needs to be updated. Readings [for liturgies] need retranslating. Work on the second version of my autobiography once in while. After my death it may be published—I’m a damn good writer!
After lunch, I lie down for an hour due to my age and infirmities; then I go back to my office or run the kitchen.
At five, I go back to the church for contemplative prayer before vespers.
Half of the time I’m a cantor; I prepare the Mass and Office [musical] inserts. I keep abreast of where we are liturgically so I can prepare for feasts and special occasions.
I have Dinner, then I go to bed and read for a few hours, but I have suffered from insomnia since I was a teenager. There are nights when I don’t sleep at all.
Occasionally I cook and shop.
I also do quite a few homilies—maybe thirty over the years. Some are on the [St. Norbert] Abbey website. I’m also a correspondent for the Abbey Magazine.
I really felt like God wanted me to write my autobiography when I joined the Norbertines. I got as far as when I joined the Trappists at eighteen and then I got stuck. Someone once called it “cutesy.” I wouldn’t dispute that. I think it was overwritten. In 2005 I started again, but this is a more private version.
I find God everywhere. I’m fortunate. I think that I was a better monk when I was working at PNM [the company where Br. Dennis was formerly employed] than I had been in the monastery. But it’s Gods grace, nothing I strive to do. Nothing that I do is of any importance. The only important thing is doing God’s will. That’s what’s led me through being a monk, having to leave, taking care of my parents, and then coming to the Norbertines. At every point, I was doing what I thought God wanted me to do.
I once told Joel that following the Spirit was simple. Joel said it was hard. I said, I didn’t say it was easy, but simple. You ask what you’re supposed to do, and then you do it. Circumstances, like caring for my parents and working at PNM, are things I was supposed to do. I don’t know why, but rarely in life do we get to know why.
Well, first of all, I really don’t look at my Trappist and Norbertine vocations as separate vocations. I was a monk and still am a monk. But this is where God wanted me to be. The Norbertine notions of communio and spiritually [in America] were actually thought up fifty years ago. The order has changed in the United States radically since [Abbot] Pennings’ time . . . we have a nine hundred-year history, but that doesn’t mean we have a central concept or identity. Like every other order, we go through an evolution. We look back at [Saint] Norbert with twenty-first century eyes, but I’m not sure we see it the way they saw it. There’s nothing bad about a religious order evolving, it’s supposed to. There’s no way we could live like they did eight hundred years ago.
When I first met the Norbertines, what struck me was their simplicity and genuineness. They reminded me of Trappists. Not the same life, but the same kind of people. Dedicated to serving God and people. People enter a religious order because of the people that are there, because you like those people and want to be like those people. If you talk to religious, if you go back to why they were first attracted, that was why . . .
Habits and schedules are not the essence of religious life.