The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd (review)

When a friend offered to lend me a copy of Mary Rose O'Reilley's book The Barn at the End of the World, I quickly declined, claiming I had too many books already and there just wasn't room in my life for even one more—borrowing Audrey Hepburn's line in Charade when she rebuffs Cary Grant's initial flirtation, saying I know far too many people at the moment and until one of them dies, well, I simply don't have room for one more acquaintance.

I had lied to my friend. There is always room for another book. I have a house overflowing with books: there are books piled on the stairs, books on the kitchen table, books stacked sideways on bookshelves that hide the titles of the books standing on end behind them. Someone might say I have a book problem.

It was a bit unusual for me to turn down the offer of a book, but I had no wish to read a book by a Catholic-Quaker-Buddhist writing about her experiences as a sheep-farmer. Show me a book about someone's spiritual quest, and watch me run. But my friend, Sister Rebecca, is also a monastic and my mentor on the subject of religion, and she had never been wrong about any book on the topic. She had introduced me to Gnosticism scholar Elaine Pagels, Jewish ethicist and mystic Abraham Heschel, and the anorexic deep thinker Simone Weil. But this time Rebecca was handing me a book by a triple-dipping spiritual gourmand and I thought this would be the exception that proves the rule.

The Barn at the End of the World is a chronicle of O'Reilley's year as an apprentice sheep-farmer in Minnesota and her month-long visit to Plum Village, a Mahayana Buddhist monastery in France, with a few stops along the way to sing Sacred Harp music. She begins the book with a few pages on "surrender"—a term that makes me, an agnostic secular humanist, want to toss the book across the room—just as someone in a dark suit with a briefcase full of WatchTowers at my doorstep makes me want to hide behind the drapery. "Surrender" is to spiritual questers what really good gardening gloves are to Martha Stewart.

The chapter is short, however, and soon O'Reilley gives the reader a very close look at the butt end of a 500-pound Hampshire ram with a prolapsed rectum. There may be just enough dung on her pants to alert readers in search of a metaphoric pilgrimage from barnyard into Buddhism that this is no ascetic metaphysical memoir. This book is not about intuiting the connections between brotherly love and satori by way of tending sheep. As a shepherd, she lacks both physical strength and coordination. As a student of Buddhism, she is moody and impatient. As a memoirist she is superb.

She writes with a Quaker's dedication to speaking only from experience and she has a poet's gift for saying more by writing less. The chapters are short and some end with a lovely after-thrum I normally only get from a poem. Her thoughts seem to drift and yet land at just the right spot—the clever gift of a good writer.

She begins in the sheep barn, wrestling recalcitrant ewes, hand-feeding newborn lambs, and drenching sheep with vermifuge. The work is messy and dangerous, and she works hard to keep her focus lest she get stomped, bitten, or killed by an angry vasectomized ram. "How hard it would be on my grown children to have to say, 'Mom was killed by a sheep. . . .'"

She makes brief excursions away from the sheep barn...