Page 2 The Sower
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6 6 119
Story by Martha Miller
Photography by Mark Davis
o
mm
(Above) The Tintern Monastery
has only one sign directing vis
itors to the isolated dirt road
fearing to the front doer, (Eigbt) ;
Stevens drives his four-vihed drive .
truck across his land to a scenic
ttkff overlooking the grour.is.
(Opposite page) Stevens prepares
for the morning services ia the
attic chspcl. .,
Tpsjather Clifford Stevens likes to compare himself to
4 Hugh Hefner. . - :
J ' Like Hefner, Stevens wants to build a mansion.
JjL But Stevens doesn't want to fill "his house" with
scantily-clad women, wine and song. Monks and prayer and
Gregorian chant will inhabit his mansion.
"If Hugh Hefner could build a mansion," says the fiery,
60-year-old priest, "then surely I can build a monastery."
And he has. Sort of.
For the past year, Stevens has been living in a wooden
barn on a rolling hillside in northeast Nebraska near
Oakdale. The barn is Stevens's house, office, chapel,
conference room, sanctuary and, he is quick to tell you, the
first step toward his $3.5 million Tintern monastery.
Inside, Stevens sinks his 5-foot, 4-inch frame behind a
large, wooden desk littered with letters and papers
concerning his 35-year-old dream to build a monastery
and start a new order of monks the first order since the
13th century. It's a dream that neither financial setbacks,
dwindling contributions nor rescheduled completion dates
have been able to shatter.
And indeed, the history of Tintern does read like a
dream, a wispy medieval vision that somehow
miraculously, maybe maintains a fragile tie to reality.
Stevens points to this history in turning aside the doubters.
" CJanuary 1979. Charlotte Taylor and members of the
Clemensen family heard of Stevens's desire to build a
monastery and offered him purchase rights on a 240-acre
plot of farmland southwest of Oakdale in the Cedar Creek
area.
One month later, Joe and Emma Velder of St.
Petersburg presented Stevens with the down payment.
.In 1984, bankrupt farmer-turned-carpenter John Fry
of Tilden and his 1 3 children volunteered to build Stevens
a barn.
OThe night before Fry started construction, an elderly
farmer died and left Stevens $ 1 40,000.
When a local bank started cutting off Stevens's credit
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