MEPKIN ABBEY

Far up the cola colored waters of the Cooper River in Berkeley County, some thirty air miles north of Charleston, but farther by road, even farther by boat, and in some ways farther back in time, is Mepkin.

Mepkin Plantation's 7,000 plus acres have been owned by towering personalities in American history, including a key figure of the Revolution and, two centuries later, a couple who revolutionized the media and women's rights. And where bold ambition - perhaps even arrogance - once characterized the land's owners, the plantation's present stewards are marked by a humility born of a different age.

Today, Mepkin Plantation is known as Mepkin Abbey. It is home to a handful of Cistercian monks, members of a worldwide order of the Roman Catholic Church formally known as the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Obedience, but often called Trappists.

The order dates back to the year 1098, when a band of monks from the Abbey of Molesme in France took up a swampy parcel known as Citeaux and determined to live a purer life by following the precepts of St. Benedict. It was a life of prayer, sacred reading and hard work, marked by poverty and simplicity. The order spread throughout Europe, thanks to the influence of St. Bernard, who arrived at Citeaux in 1112. Five centuries later, a reform movement started at the Monastery of La Trappe in France brought the Cistercians back to their ascetic roots. The name Trappists is derived from that movement.

The monks at Mepkin Abbey live a simple life, revolving around the hours, a schedule of daily events that dates back to the earliest days of the church. The day begins at 3:20 AM with chanting of the Psalms, followed by silent meditation. As the chapel bell rings, each hour brings a new activity. Periods of strict silence alternate with moments when talk is permitted. Breakfast is followed by the Eucharist, then, at 8:30, the working day.

The Cistercians of Mepkin mainly earn their keep by raising chickens and selling compost. In this regard, the monks are thoroughly modern in every respect. There are over 30,000 chickens to tend. Eggs are gathered. Manure is processed into compost and bagged for sale at retail outlets. Meanwhile, other monks handle the necessary work of the abbey, such as maintenance and cooking.

Lunch is at noon. Considered symbolic of the sacrament, meals are taken by all the monks at the same time. Latecomers are chided. The men eat in silence. Following the noon meal are readings and prayer, with a little time left for a short nap. Then it's back to work until 3:30. After a light supper and vespers, there is compline at 7:30 and the last formal prayers of the day. An abbey brochure describes the intended effect of the schedule: "Through this never-ending rhythm of daily, weekly, monthly, yearly prayer, the monk is transformed, little by little, and becomes a living doxology to Gods grace and mercy."

The daily schedule does permit the monks to have some time alone, usually spent in contemplation walking the grounds at Mepkin, with its quiet paths and lush Lowcountry gardens - fitting, in that mepkin is a Native American word which has two meanings, one of which is lovely. However lovely the land may be, it has not always been peaceful. The Native Americans were swept away by the tide of Europeans who settled the place in the late 1600s. The newcomers, mostly French and English in this far-flung parish of Charles Town, installed their own economies on the land, economies driven by and dependent upon slavery. Generations of anonymous Africans poured their life blood into these fields to raise an agricultural product that ruled international trade long before cotton became synonymous with slavery.

Mepkin was once a thriving plantation in the heart of South Carolina's Lowcountry rice industry. Far enough inland to have fresh water, but close enough to the sea to rise and fall with the tides, the Cooper River at Mepkin allowed rice fields to be systematically flooded and drained as the crop required. The rice grown on these lands and others like them produced enormous wealth - so much so that in 1700 the South Carolina colony was the greatest single source of cash for the British Crown. Mepkin was purchased in 1762 by Henry Laurens. A Charleston Huguenot who imported goods from the West Indies, Laurens now added rice, indigo, naval stores and other agricultural exports to his business. Laurens prospered, soon owning eight upriver plantations. He also bought and sold slaves. While some of his correspondence from the 1760s indicates he no longer favored the institution, he could not bring himself to free any of his 300 slaves.

A decade later, Laurens, by now a force in Lowcountry politics, found himself increasingly embroiled in the growing conflict between crown and colony. When Revolution finally came, Laurens stood firmly with the rebels, serving as the first president of the Continental Congress, 1777-1778. Later, while on a mission to seek war loans from the Dutch, Laurens was captured at sea by the British and taken to England. Though treated harshly by his captors, Laurens showed an uncommon degree of defiance. When his son turned up in France lobbying for the rebel cause, Laurens was pressured by the British to persuade the son to return to America - or else. "He loves me dearly," Laurens coolly replied, "but I am sure that he would not sacrifice his honor to save my life, and I applaud him." Laurens remained imprisoned in the Tower of London until the end of the war, gaining his freedom only when exchanged for Lord Cornwallis, who had surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown in 1781. Laurens died eleven years later. According to his last wishes, his remains were burned and buried at Mepkin.

Lowcountry plantations such as Mepkin created wealth and spawned dynasties for more than 200 years. By the end of the Nineteenth Century, however, slavery was dead and the best rice fields were found elsewhere, along America's Gulf Coast and in Southeast Asia. The great plantations were sold or broken into smaller farms. The families moved away. Mepkin, like other Lowcountry baronies, changed hands. A new century dawned, a modern century that would view the plantation culture which once ruled here as something now antique and picturesque, a thing out of novels, the subject of movies.

In 1936, Henry and Clare Boothe Luce purchased Mepkin Plantation. They were the essence of glamour and power in Depression-era America. Henry Luce had started Time Magazine in the 1920's. The venture, which also included Life and Fortune, had grown in a few short years into a media powerhouse. This same organization would eventually become today's mammoth AOL-Time Warner. Clare Luce was a beautiful, intelligent and ambitious nobody who married a dissolute New York millionaire named Brokaw, worked her way into high society, divorced Brokaw - but stayed put on the social register.

Clare Luce may have married her way up the ladder, but she earned her stay. She was brilliant, politically savvy and relentlessly aggressive about what women could achieve. She was managing editor of Vanity Fair when that publication was a national barometer of who counted and why. She was first name friends - sometimes enemies - with movers and shakers from Roosevelt to Churchill, Eisenhower to Nehru. Although a conservative Republican, she maintained a deep friendship with Bernard Baruch, an influential member of President Roosevelt's kitchen cabinet and himself owner of Hobcaw Barony, a Lowcountry coastal estate at Georgetown.

In 1936, Clare wrote The Women, a hit stage play that went on to become a movie. With its all-female cast, its stinging dialogue and a feminist viewpoint that rings true today, the play still shows up in regional theaters and the occasional Broadway revival. Clare liked to bring people from Hollywood, New York and Washington for a stay at Mepkin. She loved playing the baroness. She and Henry had built an impressive manor house. They entertained with duck hunts, fishing trips and horseback riding. It was not unusual for her to hold court at Mepkin with producers and directors, editors and congressmen. She commissioned noted Charleston landscape architect Loutrell Briggs to design and build extensive gardens for her. Filled with native plants and rows of Lowcountry favorites such as camellias an azaleas, the gardens still draw tourists to this day. Clare could happily stay at Mepkin for weeks, but Henry jogged tediously back and forth to New York and his magazines, never quite comfortable with the role of country squire.

The Luces were complicated people. Henry was cool, often abrupt, a taskmaster who made senior editors quake in their boots. Clare was multi-talented, keenly aware that she was both revered and hated for the being the first woman to accomplish this task or to occupy that position. Their marriage was strained by frequent separations. They were both intensely competitive and possessed of outsized egos.

In 1944, while Clare was running for Congress from Connecticut, her daughter Ann Brokaw, a 20 year old student at Stanford, was killed in a freak automobile accident. Stricken with grief, Clare retreated to Mepkin. Lost in her pain, Clare remembered the name of a Catholic priest who once sent her a fan letter. She had responded, and the priest had kept up a steady correspondence with her over the years. She found the priest's number and called him. The priest referred her to Father Fulton J. Sheen in Washington. It was the beginning of a path to faith for Clare, a woman who had never had much use for religion and who, by her own admission, knew only one prayer, the Lord's Prayer.

Clare Boothe Luce entered the Catholic Church in February, 1946. Three years later, the Luces donated a major portion of Mepkin Plantation to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, with the intent that it become the home for a new monastic community. In the end - for Henry, 1967; for Clare, 1987 - their remains came to Mepkin for burial. They lie side by side.

At the time of the Luce's gift, the Abbey of Gethsemani was in the spotlight for its association with monk Thomas Merton, whose writings were then becoming popular. Within a few years, Clares religious mentor Father Sheen would also find national fame as Bishop Sheen, one of the first religious figures to achieve widespread popularity in the 1950's on the new medium of television.

Such popularity is immaterial to the present residents of Mepkin. The Trappists are content to let the world go by. It's not as if they shut out the world - on the contrary, visitors are welcome for an hour, a day or a week. Mepkin Abbey has a few simple rooms for those seeking a retreat from the pressures of modern life. Visitors come from all over the world to pray and meditate and work alongside the monks at Mepkin. The recently completed Clare Booth Luce library contains thousands of titles dealing with spiritual matters. If the brothers prefer simplicity, the library nonetheless contains a state of the art conference center for use by church and diocesan groups.

Many visitors come for the gardens. The grand design laid out by Loutrell Briggs was renovated in 1988 under the leadership of Nancy Bryan Luce, wife of Henry's son Henry Luce III. No fees are charged for any visit, whether for an hour or a week. Contributions, while not solicited, are accepted. There's even a gift shop that offers spiritual books, tapes, icons and products such as honey and candies from other Trappist monasteries.

Not that there's much money in it. That's not what the monks are about. They pray and meditate and maintain periods of silence because they seek to hear God in the practice. They work hard on the chicken farm because Christ surely worked hard as a carpenter. They have little or nothing.

What they do have, they own in common. And they happily share with all who arrive at their door.

And when they die, the bones of these humble men will go into the soil near the graves of the rich and powerful - Henry Laurens and Clare Boothe Luce and Henry Luce - and not far from the unmarked graves of the powerless and the beaten - the slaves and the Indians - all of whom, in their humanity, lived on this lovely place along the banks of the Cooper River, watched the water slide beneath the sun on its ancient path to the sea and ultimately realized the other meaning of the Native American word "mepkin"-serenity.

Copyright, 2003, Kiawah Island Legends Magazine. Reprinted with permission