What's going on down there?

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hello it's throughout here today is December 31st 2019 New Year's Eve and I decide is gonna go ahead and film a video today what I've been wanting to do for really a long time been hitting a lot of requests for me to do this video and I figured this time would be a great time to do this the abbey is shut down there's nobody here I can do what I want to do for a long time which is to just show what I do at the Abbey and the cottage industries that are also here at the Abbey that other people work at I know for a lot of people that have been following channel for a long time that you're familiar with what I do but for folks that are just coming on or haven't been watching for too long they may have questions as wondering as to what my function is my role at the Abbey do I have a job what do I do exactly so just to clarify things as to my function I'm a volunteer just like the other hundred and something volunteers here at the Abbey we're just people that have an affection for the monks and we donate our time and talent for their betterment betterment because the abbey is so diverse in the industries that that are here there's no way that the monks could supply the pot manpower necessary to run these businesses so for that very reason they are depending on volunteers to fill those slots and there are just such great people that come up here and volunteer their time so that's all I am a volunteer of course it'd be impossible in one video to show you everything but I do want to try to highlight some of the things particularly the church with the artwork in the church and just to give an overview of the daily life of here the ad line it's like a little city because the campus the whole campus is about 1200 acres and of that 1200 acres says probably 60 of it where is that the campus itself the buildings the main buildings the church the monastery seminary College and then all of the little industries that that around that they are used to support the monastery and in seminary College by the grace of God I'm going to show you shoot some good video and give a good representation of what goes on here and you'll come away with a better understanding of how things work here at the Abbey let's go wrangle up some video to show you what goes on up here now before I go I just want to point out one little thing you me you may notice directly behind me the activity that's going on it wanted a pollen fever these girls have been feeding on this pollen since I set it out which was December 12 so they are as long as it'll warm up they'll come out here and spawn feet and I do love coming out here and visiting with them let's go shoot some video huh I decided that we'd start our tour of our cottage industries here at the Woodworks because this is really where I spend most of my time you would think that it's spending time with the bees but in truth I'm here at wood works most of the time and even though I really like to be with the bees a lot more but I began working volunteering at the Abbey back in 2009 and at that time the wood shop well it was just barely a little garage shop at that time and since then it's really grown into a really really impressive business now many of you all have seen several of the videos that are shot inside of the inside of the wood shop so I'm not going to really focus on that when we go inside basically I'm going to show you what we produce here and inside the wood shop so let's go inside and take a look open the door and you walk inside what most people notice immediately is just how clean this place is it really is it's just a very clean space really easy to work get around and due to the fact that we have central dust cyst on this this place is just pretty much clean as we pass through the door into the showroom there it is this is what we produce here if it works caskets a traditional casket and a monastic cast it the species of wood that we use it's Cypress it's a native species to Louisiana which is one of the reasons why it's chosen to represent the Abbey because it is a local wood and at one time that's what caskets were built up here in Louisiana was Cypress we also build urns and you'll see the urns there's two species of wood I'm a Hagen II darker one and then the Cypress one right here you'll also notice there's two sizes of these these are the urns that we originally massage urns that we would build and now this size right here we just start building that because those will now fit two of those urns inside of the niches of our collar barium and later on in the video you'll see the collar barians that are now in place in the aviary cemetery so this is what we build urns and caskets this is the entrance to the st. Joseph Abbey retreat center and looks a little dated but inside is very modern because of the flood which happened three years ago because of that the entire building was renovated on the interior of it let's go ahead inside and look and see what they got inside I see they're preparing for the next retreat that's coming in hand you can see all the name tags so as we go down the hall past a conference rather that's going to solve it great lining in there look there's one of the podiums that we built at the woodshop - as we continue down the hall you're going to be passing the chapel chuckling look at this completely renovated that's going down the hall and yes we continue on that we start getting to the wings where the the rooms are these areas down here and then as we continue on down this is the main conference room right here salsa recreation there's another one of our podiums that we built and then at the other end of the hall [Music] roughly the question the dining home or as they call it here the refectory and that's the other half of the building looking back down other into the hallway and package the main conference room let's take a look inside one of these newly renovated rows and there are 30 rooms inside of the retreat house and they are all identical it's like a hotel room guess what these headboards and the little Scotia's above the wall hiding a light we did all that at the witch up this is the bedroom boiling these baths are some nice bathrooms and then on the other side there's a bed that's a couch but it does pull out to be a bed as well so these are really nice spacious rooms they all have their own thermostats or your temperatures what a great great place to come on a treat alright let's visit a new place and just down the road from the retreat house and the church getting ready to walk into the cemetery and the cemetery is a rather old one it dates back I'll wait til when the monastery first came here in the early early nineteen hundred's but as all the cemetery and monastery is this is brand new they just installed these within the last three months in fact I don't believe there's only two or three niches even being used right now and so these this is going to be a really wonderful addition to the cemetery so let's go back to the oldest part of the cemetery right now this is the oldest part of the cemetery and in this section right here this is where the monks are buried and they've had lots of monks have been buried in this cemetery in fact the big cross that's where the first Abbot is buried and then since I'm back here wants to show you that we even have celebrities back here that's right Walker Percy Walker Percy was was a Benedict knobbly and and his love for the abbey was one of the reasons why he's buried here and his most famous work is the movie-going I just want to say that so Walker's is buried there and his wife is buried right next to him right here let's go over to that new section now here's all the new section and this is I mean this is a lot of ground that they've opened up because the cemetery is just growing so much and as I swing the camera around and you'll see these Chinese elm trees right here come September these trees are just full of bees now that big live oak in the background right there let me see if I can zoom in on it that is one of the favorite places for people to be buried underneath and as I leave the cemetery we're gonna go ahead and get a shot of that some of the grave sites underneath the live oak and this is the largest live oak out at the Abbey right here and then you can see the grave sites just underneath the limbs of it very very very desirable right I listen over to the art studio I have to give you a little background on this building right here at one time this building was the chicken coop and they had literally thousands of chickens in here back when the monastery was raising cattle and pigs it was it was a working farm and this was their chicken coop so let's go inside there and see what they're doing inside of the abbey artworks alright so here we are on the inside and it's still a work in progress this picture right here is a picture of Gregory DeWitt who painted all the minerals here at the Abbey inside the church refectory and all around the area and I will get you inside of the church we'll show you what he had done what he has done in fact that picture that this picture is the picture of Christ which is at in the top of the sacristy and on this one wing they have the office right in here and now that the other side is the real workshop area workshop in they've got they they rent out spaces during the week and so this is the studio now and they have some people in here working beautiful [Music] nice and it smells good in here too these these walls remember I told you that the monks built a lot of things well this whole chicken coop is made out of Cypress and these are some beautiful Cypress boards and beams in here who wouldn't want to work in here all right let's check out something else [Music] now before we go inside monk so I had to shoot this door right here taking a picture of this door because this door is one of the original doors on the monastery and in the interest of the monastery it was a pair a pair of these doors in there and at the flood yeah they got kind of ruined so they were restored and now they're being repurposed and this door right here was then put onto the new building of monks so let's go ahead aside and see what we got going on here so let's go ahead and take a walk to the business end of the monk robe operation and just to get the back part right here these doors are where all the materials are brought into this tool through these doors and some of the materials it's rice oil there's some coconut oil is live right there and some vegetable oil and shea butter then this more olive oil right there so all these materials are weighed and from there being weighed get brought over to the kettle and you know where they're mixed melt it down and then once all those materials are melted down under they they come over here mix the a lime with distilled water they bring it back to the kettle mix it in there and then from the kettle then it's pretty cool and just pour the mixture into the pot and then that pot is then lift it up and brought to the mixer and then it's mixed up then from the mixer once the whole mixture is mixed they'll come over to the table right here and they've gotta settle these boards will be set up and they'll fill the boards with the soap and then once it's filled you'll cover it again and then put the foam board on top of it and then they'll let it sit for 24 hours now once it comes out of the 24 hours later then they'll bring it back to the to the other room and let's walk back there and I'll see what's going on back there and once that soap is poured and dried for 24 hours they'll bring those blocks of soap into this drum and then they'll set them on that shelf right there there's another thing on the shelf right now because Christmas time and I mean they they just sold out of everything but they'll put it on the show it dries for a few days longer I believe and then from there it goes into the cutting station right here this is another thing that we made at the shop and they take this one with the whole slab in they push it this way in the Y's in there slice it that way put that block in there and they slice it push it and then you'll slice the bars this way so I think they come out with 25 bars from each block and then once those bars are cut they'll be placed on these shelves right here where they've dried some all are and then once they're dry there they go on to the other stuff right here where they dry more I believe and then to this one which will then be wrapped and so then you finally get your wrapped so and yeah you can see this it's very low right now usually these things are just fought for they also make candles in the soap Department that's their melt that right there the wax melter and they use soy primarily and look his case got all this stuff set out for me is some of the one of the candles that they make right here and right now they're using our soy but we are going to be adding the IV honey wax to the mixture as well because we want to be able to say that we're using a bee wax and our candles as well and so these are some of the apparatus that they they used to Center and hold the wicks up I don't know very much about this stuff but I am going to do a video on this so y'all can stay tuned for that now in this very impressive looking old building houses monk suites and it was a slave quarters at one time when this was a plantation it was one one of the slave quarters and it is the last remaining building on the abbey property at least in this good of condition from that time period but inside it's been it's been over the years been used for many things and now it is now home of monk sweets now there is no sign designating it as monk sweets so you'll just have to take my word for it this is monk sweet so let's go ahead inside and look what's inside of there this side of the house this is where is the beginnings of it and I don't know a lot about this operation but what I do know is that he makes the mixture is our peanuts sugar and salt very simple and it's a Brazilian treat and brother Leo who runs this operation he's also in a gift shop he does this operation of course he's got a lot of volunteers too so they're ground up right here and then once once all that mixtures ground up they have a little press unit that we built over at the shop that they will press the candies into that shape once they're pressed into that shape put it on a tray and then they are carried over into the next room right here where they have been packaged so they bring them down to this end they package they then seal the package and then they label it and this is what the final product looks like bliss with the twist all right let's head over to the bakery and see what they do over there here's our next stop on our tour of the cottage industries here at the Abbey the bakery and the program at the bakery is called pennies for bread and as you can guess from the name of the title of the business they bake bread here and the aspect of pennies for bread is the whole business the entire business is supported by donations and so they solicit sponsors to support this program and those sponsors then pay for all the goods that they do all the goods that are used to produce the bread and the monks along with the volunteers supply the labor to make that bread they make over 1200 loaves in the two days that they work they work on a Monday and Thursday and they're did and their day begins at 3:00 in the morning so they they bake a lot of bread let's go ahead inside and see what the equipment they use and how it looks inside now I spent many mornings inside of this building helping this the monks bake the bread as well as make the dough on this side right here is where they keep all the dry flowers their yeast sugars and then they mix the dry mix in this area right here and after they mix it they bring to the mixers and then it whips all that flour and water and sugar and oil all that together and they make big like 55 pounds of bread dough at a time and then they'll take that bread dough and they'll throw it up on the counter idea that's a terrible expression they set the dough on this table right here and then they start breaking it up into pound and a half loaves they weigh each one of the loaves and you can see this the mark right here they stop 1 and a half and they'll cut out 50 pieces of dough from that big ball of dough that 50 some pound of dough and they don't stack all those pieces right here after those pieces set for a little while and start rising they'll throw them through the roller right there and that roller will then spin the dough and it'll come out in a long tube but this ends and then they'll place those long pieces of dough on this tail right here and allowed to rise once they're risen to the right amount they start putting them in the pans right there now they have a lot of pans in here and once they're in the pans they'll go into the proof errs right here and they can pull a can hold a lot of bread in here so this probably is there's four racks in here and I think there's 50 pans on each one of these racks so it's 200 loaves of bread each time they load this thing up and they pull these things out in timed increments the whole tray inside of the oven right here and then that oven will then bake the bread I think it's about 18 minutes and then once the timer goes off they pull it out box the tray out they bring it over here and then they start separating the bread from the pans on that tray right here and then they load the bread onto these trays right here and then take the hot bread and they bring it to this room over here and let it cool now you may have noticed this line of chairs under well so there is a lot of downtime in this operation waiting for the bread to rise whether it's on the table or in the oven or just baking so volunteers get a lot of time to sit down and talk and they always have coffee and food over here so it's a good thing so once the bread has been cooled on this end that's the work for the monks and the volunteers at this end then the next shift comes in around 10:00 11:00 in the morning and they start cutting the bread and there's usually about six or eight men and women here they slice the bread on the slicer and bag it and then put it on in those containers right there they put the loaves of bread in there and then those are then brought to the shelters or wherever they need to be directed to so that's a basic tour of the cottage industries here at the Abbey but the principle building at the Abbey well the monastery itself the monastery and the church and this building right here is building was built in 1908 they had a fire most - there's a lot of monasteries that burnt down and this one was no exception they burnt this burnt down in 1908 they built this big structure right here and in this building this is where the monks live they have they have their meals in a separate building behind this refractory and these places I can't bring the camera to show you that so I'm sorry I can't do that but at times they are open for tour for the public to go to but this isn't one of those so we're going to close this video with not going into the monastery but we are going into the church because I've got to show you the the artwork in this church by the Benedictine monk Gregory DeWitt let's go inside the church and see what he's done [Music] that wraps up this video y'all enjoy the tour nope y'all got a little better insight of what goes on here at the heavy so thanks for watching keep on watching I'll be making mine god bless mr. ed I'm out of here until next year [Music]

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Views: 15,904

Rating: 4.9291339 out of 5

Keywords: What's going on down there?, Saint Joseph Abbey and Seminary College, Benedictine monks, moneastaries, cottage industries, soap making, bread baking, casket building, coffin building, candy making, art, art studios, cemetaries, grave sites, monks, seminary college, honey, honey processing

Id: NzByZB7f7vI

Length: 34min 29sec (2069 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 31 2020