Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas (1953)
I met Thomas Merton in my early twenties at what was, I now see, a lonely time in my life. It was also a verbose time. I was always talking. My form of loneliness has always wanted to make a lot of noise, perhaps to put other people off the scent. A wise old man, three times my age, put a copy of Merton’s fourth book, The Sign of Jonas, into my hands. I was captivated. It was more than that. It is a book I have turned to constantly for the last thirty years. Sometimes I look at the beautiful photo in the end papers of a man standing alone in the woods, overshadowed by the majesty of trees in winter. I start reading and never fail to fall under its spell. It is a book that has helped me understand the exciting journey from loneliness to solitude.
Thomas Merton, a Cistercian monk, made that journey. He died in a bizarre accident in Thailand in 1968, aged fifty-four, electrocuted by a faulty fan in his bathroom. There was no autopsy, so rumours spread about both murder and suicide, although these possibilities are implausible. It was unusual enough that he was in Thailand in the first place, addressing a conference on Marxism and monasticism, two isms that seldom belong together. A Cistercian monk does not normally stray from his or her monastery and, besides, Merton had for some years pursued life as a hermit in the forest of Gethsemani Abbey, in distant Kentucky. But Merton’s vision was never limited by the walls of the monastery, nor even by the limits of the visible world. He became one of the significant activists of the 1960s, an interesting way to describe someone whose life was a commitment to stillness. He wrote against war, imperialism, poverty, commercial greed and other forms of madness that are too much taken for granted. He carried on an extraordinary correspondence with everyone from Boris Pasternak to Coretta Scott King. In December 1961, Merton wrote to his friend Ethel Kennedy, the wife and later widow of Robert F. Kennedy. Merton was concerned about the martial stance of her brother-in-law JFK. His words are prescient for the politics of our times:
Why is war such a problem to us?…I wonder to what extent our ideals are now a front for organized selfishness and systematic irresponsibility…We cannot go on living every man for himself…Certainly our most basic need is for truth and not for ‘images’ and slogans that ‘engineer consent’. We are living in a dream world. We do not know our friends or our adversaries. We are myths to ourselves and they are myths to us. And we are secretly persuaded that we can shoot it out like the sheriffs on TV. This is not reality.
Merton’s life fell into two neat halves. Until the age of twenty-seven, he was ambitious and chaotic. Having been born in France, orphaned, and educated in England, he taught literature at Columbia University in New York, where he was acclaimed as a writer of great promise. He was no stranger to loneliness. His parents were both artists, drawn into the energy of New York. His mother died when he was six; his father, a New Zealander, when he was fourteen. Merton’s last memories of his father, who had a brain tumour, were of the man continuing to draw even after other abilities had left him. Merton was rootless. He was often irresponsible: he was the father of a child for whom he offered little care and who died in an air raid during World War II. Ironically, his only sibling, John Paul, was killed taking part in an air raid in 1943. The plane John Paul was flying over Germany was shot down and the younger Merton survived for some hours with a broken back in a rubber dingy floating on the English Channel, desperate for water. His older brother became an ardent pacifist. His experience at many levels led him to appreciate the difference between destruction and creativity. God became for him another name for creativity.
In December 1941, Merton entered Gethsemani, not far from Louisville, where the future Muhammad Ali was born a month later. Ali’s widow, Lonnie, has pointed out resonances between the lives of these two fighters. On the surface, they were yin and yang. Underneath, they were both passionate believers whose faith concluded that all was not right with the world. In modern Louisville, Muhammad Ali Boulevard runs into Thomas Merton Square. This was the place where, visiting a doctor some years after entering Gethsemani, Merton had a vision of the whole world as a kind of monastery. A world without walls. A world that could learn to be quiet and gentle and at peace. A community of listeners.
The Sign of Jonas is based on a journal Merton kept of life at Gethsemani in the years between 1946 and 1952. I love the ways in which Merton struggles to find his own authenticity. One cold January day, he writes:
For the first time in my life, I am finding you, O solitude. I can count on the fingers of one hand the few short moments of purity, of neutrality, in which I have found you. Now I know I am coming to the day in which I will be free of words: their master rather than their servant, able to live without them if need be. For I still need to go out into this no-man’s land of language that does not quite join me to other (people) and which throws a veil over my own solitude…The speech of God is silence.
When Merton entered the monastery, he was not running away. In fact, his journey was the opposite. Cistercian spirituality, sometimes also known as Trappist spirituality, is beautiful and austere. It is a raw salad without dressing: the community lives in radical silence. At times, communities have even developed their own sign language to obviate the need for speech. On arrival at Gethsemani, Merton was amused that a sign resembling ‘past your eyes’ was used for milk, from ‘pasteurised’. The community follows The Rule of Saint Benedict, part of which is read aloud to the monks or nuns every day as they eat in the refectory. Benedict’s sixth-century rule creates a hearty balance of work and its opposite. It is one of the great documents in the history of homemaking, whose only hard and fast instruction is ‘listen’, the word with which the rule begins: ‘Listen carefully with the ear of the heart to the advice of a father who loves you.’ Benedict knew that not even the most pure spirits ever stop being human. Merton understood this. Even in the monastery, people around him could grate on his nerves. Despite a life of radical silence, monks have a close physical relationship. In the middle of January 1950, he writes:
It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am, the more affection I have for them. It is pure affection, and filled with reverence for the solitude of others. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.
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The Sign of Jonas was written towards the end of Merton’s romance with community; he would shortly afterwards begin life in a forest hermitage on the property of the monastery. The book ends with a justly famous epilogue called ‘Fire-watch, July 4, 1952’. On a hot summer’s night, Merton had the duty of walking around the weatherboard monastery from top to bottom, looking for the first sign of any fire that might destroy the place. As he walks around, every corner of Gethsemani is the occasion of a memory and a prayer. Every sleeping monk is the occasion of gratitude, wonder and, yes, even befuddlement. Merton writes: ‘The night, O my Lord, is a time of freedom.’ I think he means it is a time to take perspective, to see things that can’t be seen with the eyes. ‘You, who sleep in my breast,’ he continues, ‘are not met with words, but in the emergence of life within life and of wisdom within wisdom.’
At the end of every school year, we take the incoming student leaders away for a few days. It is a wonderful time when young people express all the hopes that come with being seventeen and confident you can change the world. As part of the experience, some of us rise at five in the morning to visit a Cistercian monastery where a group of monks live in almost complete silence, pursuing a lifestyle that has not changed much since the eleventh century. Young people find this commitment confronting. It is far more outrageous to them than any possible expression of sexuality. Coco Chanel grew up in a Cistercian monastery; Chanel No. 5 has always struck me as an ineffable combination of silence and sex.
Br Bernie, one of the most sane people I know, is the prior of the abbey we visit at Tarrawarra, where he has lived for forty or more years. I tell the students that Bernie is one of the few friends with whom I have never argued. That is because he so seldom speaks. He describes the monastery as a ‘fridge magnet’, something that reminds the rest of the world that it doesn’t have as much to say as it thinks it might. Bernie believes that God doesn’t use many words either. His life involves listening to deep silence. The students are gobsmacked. So, each time, am I.