UPDATED: Father Methodius Recalls Civil Rights Past And Meeting Dr. King

The 97-year-old monk at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit has led a fascinating life, including serving as a Marine in China, and marching with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sixty years ago, Father Methodius received quite the surprise. He found out that he’d been volunteered by prior Father Joachim Tierney to create 30 stained glass windows for 3 Black churches burned by the KKK around Augusta, GA in 1962. The churches had been targeted and firebombed in a campaign of Klan-orchestrated White terrorism and intimidation as retaliation for a summer of voter registration led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC vowed to rebuild, even getting baseball legend Jackie Robinson and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to fundraise. The organization also contracted Atlanta architects and sought the closest stained glass maker they could find, which happened to be Methodius at the Monastery of Holy Spirit, a cloistered Order of the Cistercians Strict Observers (OCSO).

“I didn’t really connect it to Civil Rights at the time,” said Methodius, his eyes still sharp and azure like the blue stained glass shards dotting his work studio on the monastery grounds. “I was always into art, even from a young age, but I never looked at [stained glass making] as an art. It was just a job to be done.”

A Military Man

Born as Richard Telnack in Detroit in 1928, Methodius had already lived a full life before joining the Monastery in rural Conyers, Georgia in 1949. By his early twenties, he’d studied architecture at Catholic University of America in D.C. and served as a Marine in Beijing shortly after the end of WWII.

He also already had an interest in Civil Rights. After enlistment in ’46, while on his way to boot camp in Parris Island, South Carolina, Methodius stopped in Atlanta where he came face-to-face with segregation. “I got off the train in Atlanta and saw this big sign: ‘Whites Only’ and ‘Colored,’” he recalled. “And I didn’t like that. That’s one of the reasons I came to the Monastery in Georgia.”

Interestingly, it was during his military service in Beijing where the young marine first met Trappist monks. At the time, the country was nearing the end of a two-decade-long Civil War between the Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party. Telnack was stationed on an airbase south of Beijing, serving in a support role to help repatriate Japanese and Korean people displaced by World War II. During leave, he visited the sites around Beijing including the famous Forbidden City, the Confucian Temple of Heaven and a lesser known, separate Temple of Heaven, a french monastery run Trappist monks who made milk as a trade. 

“I can still see the little bottles with ‘Trappist’ printed on them,” Methodius told Catholic publication Aleteia in a recent interview. This monastery clearly left an impression on the young soldier.

Heeding The Call

When he returned to the States, he used his GI Bill to study architecture at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. At Catholic University, Methodius saw a friend making a reservation for a retreat at a monastery in Georgia and, last-minute, decided to sign up as well.

The retreat took place during Holy Week in 1949 and changed the young architecture student. “I liked what I saw,” he later told Victor A. Kramer, one of the founders of the International Thomas Merton Society. In 1949, at just the age of 21, he entered the Monastery on the Feast of the Assumption of Mary.

At the time, only the foundation of the Abbey Church existed. “There were 21 monks at the time, most of them farmers and still living with a vow of silence,” recalled Methodius, who would soon put his architectural acumen to good use. “The architect for the whole building, when we were 22 feet, 4 inches up, had a nervous breakdown and I took over after that. I was on every concrete pour and I designed the original bell tower.”

And when the new Abbey Church needed stained glass windows, Methodius stepped up, learning that skill from Atlanta-based Llorens Stained Glass Studio and later in West Virginia with the Blenko Glass Company. Now 97, Fr. Methodius is the last of the original monks who constructed the Monastery of the Holy Spirit.

30 Stained Glass Windows

Like all who joined the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (also known as “Trappists”), Methodius had to take a vow of stability to only leave the monastic grounds with permission. However, even cloistered away from the world in rural Georiga, the young monk wasn’t immured the system of racism and Jim Crow that had run the South for generations.

On his way to that initial retreat that inspired him to join the Monastery, Methodius had to take a bus from Atlanta to Conyers. He took a seat toward the back of the bus and was confused that Black passengers stood in the aisle next to him, despite empty seats up front. “Would you please move up to the front of the bus,” a Black woman asked Methodius, who didn’t know he’d crossed the segregated color line on busses in Georgia. “These seats are our seats.”

“That kind of shook me,” he recalled in an interview for The Merton Annual in 1984. “So, something about the racial conditions in the South is also what influenced my entering [the monastery].”

So, more than a dozen years after taking his monastic vows, when prior Father Tierney told Methodius that he’d already been conscripted to construct 30 brand-new windows for the 3 destroyed African American churches, Methodius didn’t delay. Then-Abbot Augustine Moore permitted Methodius to travel to Atlanta to work with architects to determine the size of the windows. Splitting the duties with a coworker named Anselm Atkins, Methodius quickly built his stained glass pieces utilizing the same techniques and glass he used for the monastery refectory: simple rectangles that allowed for easy construction and painting of civil rights leaders and scripture figures: Jesus and the prophets. In short time, Methodius and Atkins finished all the windows. 

In early 1963, Methodius, Moore and the Atlanta architects attended the dedication ceremonies for the new churches where Dr. King spoke. “I got to meet him,” said Methodius about his run-in with the Civil Rights icon. “I shook his hand and thanked him for being there.”

Civil Rights Legacy

That wasn’t the end of the Monastery’s social justice work either. During the height of the Civil Rights movement, prior Father Joachim Tierney maintained regular contact with the SNCC. In fact, it was this connection that led the prior to volunteering his “artist-in-residence” Methodius to the cause of building 30 stained glass windows for the burned Augusta area churches.

According to the Monastery’s oral tradition, Abbot Moore also wrote letters to Dr. King about participating in marches. While Dr. King replied that Moore’s place was in the sanctuary, on his knees in prayer, other monks did march. In 1967, in his simple black and white habit, Methodius and monastic novice Stephen Gosselin demonstrated with 400 others, including Dr. King and Coretta Scott King, marching from Ebenezer Baptist to Georgia’s capitol steps. Methodius once again shook Dr. King’s hand. “When Dr. King came along he sparked something in everyone,” said Methodius.

A year later, an assassin’s bullet struck down Dr. King on a hotel balcony in Memphis—his work left unfinished. 

The monastery hasn’t been as politically active since those days. Six decades later, Methodius is mostly retired but still experiments with glass in his shop where hang several of his windows in blue, and black and white. He’s still dedicated to the good works, too, most recently designing the stained glass windows in the Lyke House Chapel in the Catholic Student Center of the Atlanta University Center, which serves several Historically Black Colleges.

Looking back on his 97 years, Methodius has a surprising take on it all. “Life is serious,” he said, “but don’t lose your sense of humor. [That] will see us through even the darkest times.”

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