H.HAINES & CO.

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In the monastery’s guest dining room, hanging on a wall, unnoticed among a dozen tintypes

Abbey church, early days 

and old photos, is a handsome wooden picture frame about 14” by 18.” At first glance it looks as if someone has removed the picture that’s supposed to be there and left the wooden backing, a piece of age-blackened wood.  But a closer look at the wood reveals an intriguing detail: its surface is covered with nearly invisible scratches that, on further inspection, turn out to be names: Ed Amend, Otto Heresel, H. Haines, and others. When the light is just right, you can make out, among the names crudely scratched with a nail, a couple of elegant signatures done in what appears to be pen and ink. The latter seem to be much older than the others, but maybe that’s simply because the ink has disappeared into the dark wood.

Abbey church today

Some fifteen years ago, we hired someone to restore the paintings in the abbey church. While moving through the crawl space between the roof and the flat ceiling of a side aisle, he noticed this board nailed to a beam. When he realized that it was a collection of workers’ “signatures,” he detached it and brought it down to show the monks. Scratched among the names, the date 1/19/15 appears twice. But some of the signatures appear to be older than the carved date.

Evidently the names belong to men who built the church in the 1880’s or improved it in 1915.

Whenever I look at the now-framed piece of wood, I started musing: These men were not architects or artists, right? They were probably laborers hauling lumber for the the roof and ceiling. Did the first people to sign the wood do so in broad daylight, before the slate roof was installed?Did Otto and Ed know one another? Did they eat lunch together?

The men who scratched their names on that dark wood would have made up a team, hoisting wood up to the roof together, and holding beams in place as one of them drove the nails or the pegs. Each of them was a unique individual, as you can see from the way each signed his name, from the fastidious fellow who signed in ink, to “H. Haines” who signed his name four times in four different ways (I bet his co-workers laughed, knowing that this was just H. Haines being himself).

With permission of  Marylou and Jerome Bongiorno

Constructing a church requires a lot of different people all cooperating with one another. Building a community requires the same thing, whether a parish or a monastery. Each time I bring visitors into our guest dining room, I show them the dark board with the names scratched on it, and thank these workmen for building our church for us, and also for reminding us, by writing their names on a single small piece if wood, that in order to build a community we need to work together as one -- even if some of us sign our name four times.