The Pantagraph from Bloomington, Illinois • Page 43

Tl 'F PANTA GRAPH, Surliy, 1Por. T3 This monastery is solitary dream Cf Aposloiorum a OAKDALE, Neb. (AP) The road to monastic seclusion is narrow, anything but straight, and paved all the way with ruts, mud holes and jagged, oil pan-bending boulders. "If you can't make it up to the monastery, stop off at my farm and borrow the horse," suggested Dick Childs, in all Nebraska seriousness, at the gas station in town. The car bogged down, but Father Clifford Stevens, the founder and so far the only monk at the Monastery of Tintern, came to the rescue in a muddy front-wheel-drive vehicle.

"The county promised to improve this road, but I'm not sure we want better accessibility," Stevens shouted over the engine knocks as the barn-like monastery came into sight around the last tortuous bend. "Our aim is to keep SfclTDbiTiine. IZ 3-n -4 a 3U iiTsteteritis ante re-gefc -I: i 35 tion stored would be made available to scholars around the world, "who could code into our network." Stevens envisions a community of scholars, sculptors, poets, potters and above all theologians. For 25 years he has been compiling his order's constitution. It outlines a 10-year training for the monks in philosophy, theology, research methods and a thorough grounding in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, the Biblical languages.

Even after taking final vows and his ordination as a priest, the monk of Tintern will pursue advanced theological studies with video tapes, lectures and a tutorial system "similar to St. Johns at Annapolis." "I've had 300 inquiries already," enthuses Stevens. "Young people are weary of the materialism of the world and turning to God. It's not an escape, they're fleeing toward something." At that moment the phone rang. A priest from Atlanta, a specialist in Canon Law, was interested in joining the community.

"Within 10 years," Stevens was telling him, "there will be monasteries like this in every state. We are witnessing a vast explosion of the ascetic life." Over coffee, the founder monk, awaiting his first novices, admitted that "realistically only one in 20 will stay. It's like medical school, but requiring greater commitment. The monks will spend the rest of their lives here. I have a lovely graveyard picked out in a grove of cottonwoods near an old Pawnee burial ground." In Protestant northeast Nebraska, where within the memory of the older farmers Ku Klux Klansmen burned crosses and Catholics defended their fields and churches with shotguns, Stevens donned the white-hooded robe with leather belt and wine-colored scapular or shoulder covering that he had designed for the Monks of Tintern.

"It's a wash-and-wear fabric, not unbleached muslin like the monks' robes in the Middle Ages. I'm not an antiquarian and I'm not into nostalgia. This monastery has a washing machine, showers, a microwave oven and a Xerox instead of paintbrushes and parchment for copying manuscripts." Before retiring, he displayed a Lincoln, architect's rendering of a $3.2 million monastery, inspired by the ruins of Tintern Abbey, that he hopes will replace the barn structure within the decade. Work is scheduled to begin on one wing next spring. Dawn came with a golden pinkish glow, like stained glass, on the frost-rimed window of the guest cubicle, the rich aroma of freshly brewed coffee and, from the chapel overhead, a Gregorian chant in a resonant baritone.

Even before the first novices arrive, Stevens endeavors to follow the horarium, or daily schedule, prescribed in his constitution and patterned after the sixth century rule of St. Benedict. He rises at 3 a.m. to chant the psalms greeting a new day. Time on the monastic clock is ticked off by the chanting of lauds, terce, sext, none, vespers and compline, which divide the day into periods of work, study, sung prayer and simple, meatless meals.

Bedtime for the Monk of Tintern is 8 p.m. His aim is to keep the life simple and uncluttered. By the Middle Ages some monasteries had so expanded on the Benedictine rule that monks were told how to blow 0 7M Super. At top, Father Clifford Stevens' glasses hung in place on a book of Gregorian chants in the Tintern Monastery chapel in Oakdale, Neb. Above, left, Father Stevens walked through the snow outside the monastery building.

Above, the Father spent time reading underneath a straw crucifix at the monastery. At left, Father Stevens extinguished his candle lighter after preparing for morning mass. Ms. Fossey Melvin M. Payne, chairman of the National Geographic Society's Board of Trustees, said yesterday in Washington, D.C.

Si I JT 1 the world at a distance, not because it's evil, but because solitude to a monk is freedom, the freedom to pursue God with the intensity of a lover seeking a rendezvous with his beloved." The silence of the deep surrounding woods was broken only by a great blue heron lifting off over the dove-shaped pond with powerful flapping wings. Americans, Stevens regretted, have always looked down on the contemplative life as a waste of human resources, but he summoned Albert Camus, the French existentialist, as a witness for the defense of solitude: "There are no more deserts. There are no more islands. Yet one still feels the need of them. To understand this world, one must sometimes turn away from it; to serve men better one must hold them at a distance." Stevens, a former Air Force chaplain who has flown at twice the speed of sound in an F-104 and once applied for astronaut training "They never even answered my letter" spoke enthusiastically of the joys of living a life of silence as he showed off the tiny, 8-by-12-foot rough pine cubicles where the monks would sleep on slat board beds and straw mattresses that would stir the inmates of Attica to bang their mess trays against the bars.

"If Hugh Hefner can found a Playboy empire, I can help recover a tradition that has been lost for 700 years," he says in defense of his dream of founding America's first monastic order, the Monks of Tin-tern, and the first new order anywhere since the Servites in the 13th Century. "Our community will be built on the four pillars of solitude, study, the chanting of the psalms and the celebration of the Eucharist," he continues, leading the way up a spiral staircase to the library and skylight-roofed chapel. "The monks will engage in no business or commerce. There will be none of what Thomas Merton called 'Holy Jesus, Buy Our The contemplative life is primary. When you have a business it becomes secondary and the monks become employees.

"The problem with many monasteries today is the economic side has become the dominant side, selling wines, jellies, vestments and even shaving lotions. Some European nuns work in breweries and chocolate factories, and there's an American monastery turning out 15,000 loaves of bread a day." The 59-year-old priest sees modern Tintern, born again from the ruins of 12th Century Tintern Abbey in Wales, as a theological think tank. But instead of hovering over an illuminated manuscript in the Theologiae Sacrae Sanctuarium the reading room the modern monk of Tintern would be bent over a video screen feeding input into a computerized theological data bank specializing in the works of Thomas Aquinas. The informa Man, 61, dies following fire FARMER CITY A 61-year-old Farmer City man died following a garage fire at his residence yesterday. McLean County Coroner Ed Books said autopsy results were not available last night in the death of Leo Robert Bray, who died at 1:30 p.m.

yesterday at St. Joseph's Hospital Medical Cepter, Bloomington. Books was not certain if Bray died as a result of the fire. He was taken to the hospital by Farmer City ambulance workers called to the fire that started about 1 p.m. yesterday, according to Farmer City police officer Odell Lamb.

Lamb, who helped at the scene, said last night the blaze started as a small smouldering fire. Bray was working in the garage at the time of the fire, but Odell was not certain what he was doing and cause of the fire was not known last American naturalist Fossey slain their noses "so as to give the least offense to the attending angels." "We will not use any sign language here. If anything important has to be said, say it," Stevens says over a breakfast of black coffee, plain bread and orange juice served against a background of more Gregorian chant pouring from a tape recorder. night. Lamb said Bray had fallen in the garage and was found with a fire extinguisher in his hand.

Bray had been in poor health, according to Lamb. His obiturary appears on page F2. Three injured in gas explosion CHICAGO (AP) Three people were injured last night when a propane-gas heater exploded at a North Side construction site, authorities said. Fire Department spokesman Jerry Lawrence said several workmen were in the old St. Regis Hotel when the heater exploded, spreading fire to two floors of the vacant building.

Authorities said three people were admitted to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in serious tional wildlife community. In an interview with The Associated Press at her camp in May, one of the last of the few she allowed, Ms. Fossey said, without sounding regretful, "I have no friends. "The more you learn about the dignity of the gorilla, the more you want to avoid people," she said. Acquaintances of Ms.

Fossey said she told them she hoped to die in her highland rain forest, although she told her interviewer in May she would stay there only as long as she thought the gorillas remained threatened by poachers. "Dian Fossey was a dedicated scientist who devoted her entire adult life to the study of mountain gorillas, whom she considered to be affectionate, friendly animals, nothing like the savage beasts known only from the theatrical portrayal of their behavior," Dr. 1 ficials at the radio station, in the Rwandan capital of Kigali, later said by telephone that Ms. Fossey was killed Thursday. The radio station said few details about the attack were known.

Station employees said authorities had made no arrests and that an investigation was under way. Ms. Fossey, of Monterey, lived in a two-room corrugated metal cottage near the top of Mont Visoke in Volcanoes National Park in northern Rwanda. She referred to the animals as "my" gorillas, gave them names like Coco and Pucker, learned to mimic their sounds, and even built a cemetery near her cabin for gorillas killed by poachers. Her controversial views and sometimes eccentric behavior at times embarrassed both the Rwan-dii government and the interna- i NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) Dian Fossey, an American naturalist who spent most of the past 18 years befriending and defending Rwanda's rare mountain gorillas, was killed by attackers at her remote mountain cabin, Rwandan officials said yesterday.

Ms. Fossey, 53, began her pioneering work with gorillas of central Africa in 1967 and soon pronounced them a misunderstood, gentle species. Through articles, television programs and a 1983 book, "Gorillas in the Mist," she crusaded to protect the endangered animals from poachers who sell gorilla heads and hands as ashtrays and household decorations. A Nairobi-based Rwandan diplomat, Gregoire Karambizi, told The Associated Press the killing was reported yesterday morning on state-run Radio Rwanda. Of-.