Imagine for a moment that you are a monk at the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani in 1941. Your daily routine would look something like this:
You rise at two in the morning.
Before your first meal—four hours from now—you go to the chapel to chant Matins and Lauds and to hear a homily. After spending time in meditation, you chant the Night Office, pray, chant Prime, and attend a general meeting of the community.
At 6:00 a.m., as the refectory windows brighten with the rising sun, you eat a small breakfast, called a frustulum (“snack”), after which you read, pray, attend Mass, work, pray some more, and attend None.
At 11:30 a.m., assuming you aren’t fasting, you begin your midday dinner, the main meal of the day, during which you sit silently while the lector reads passages aloud from the Bible or other approved readings. Afterward, in summer, you lie down for meridienne, a short nap.
You spend the afternoon reading, praying, working, attending Mass, and chanting the remaining offices.
You speak little so as to preserve the meditative atmosphere, limiting yourself to necessary communications with your superiors and those you work with in the barns and fields. Otherwise, you use the traditional monastic sign language for basic communication.1
You have no supper. Before going to bed at 7:00 p.m., you examine your conscience, reflect on your sins, and pray one last time.2
•••
Most people, even the most devout, would find such a regimen stifling. For Thomas Merton, it promised to be nothing short of liberating. It offered everything he had hungered for since first dreaming of becoming a monk: discipline, solitude, and an ambiance of perpetual devotion. When he first visited the abbey for a Holy Week retreat in April 1941, he repeatedly described the place as “paradise.”3
At the time, the twenty-six-year-old Merton was teaching English at St. Bonaventure University in upstate New York. Since joining the Roman Catholic Church three years earlier, he found himself increasingly intrigued by the idea of becoming “a religious,” a monastic, a monk. It was such an ancient, almost alien idea, that it seemed the perfect vocation for a man entirely at odds with, as well as wholly immersed in, the modern world—a man who adored church Latin and Thomas Aquinas every bit as much as he loved Duke Ellington and French existentialism.
He had applied to the Franciscans, renowned for their charitable works, but was rejected when he admitted that he had gotten a woman pregnant a few years earlier. It was all for the best, he thought, since the Franciscans seemed somewhat undisciplined; despite their vow of poverty, their lifestyle smacked of luxury—they were, after all, allowed to have radios.4
Merton then wrote to Dom Frederic Dunne, the abbot of the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani in rural Kentucky, and asked if he might visit. Dunne was delighted, and the retreat was scheduled for Easter week 1941.5
In preparation, Merton trolled through the stacks in the campus library for as much information about monastic orders as he could find. He was attracted to the Carthusians and the Trappists, both of whom placed a high value on silence and contemplation. But his imagination was particularly fired by the photographs he found in The Catholic Encyclopedia of the rugged mountain-cave hermitages of the Camaldolese monks of central Italy. “What I saw on those pages,” he wrote, “pierced me to the heart like a knife. . . . There were still men on this miserable, noisy, cruel earth, who tasted the marvelous joy of silence and solitude. . . . In an instant, the desire of those solitudes was wide open within me like a wound.”6 He had to slam the book shut, so fiercely did he covet that life.
But Italy was out of the question. Europe, then in the second year of a catastrophic war, was increasingly under the heel of the Nazis, and Italy had aligned itself with Germany. Fascists were on the march, leaving the Camaldolese most certainly in a “miserable, noisy, cruel” place. Nor was the situation much better for the Carthusians. Their central abbey, just north of Grenoble, was in Vichy France. (A year later, in 1942, Italian forces took control of the area until the Germans occupied it in 1943.) Other Carthusian abbeys in the region were either inaccessible because of the war or on the verge of being engulfed by it, and no Carthusian monasteries yet existed in the United States. It was not a good time to become a monk in Europe. For Merton, the Trappists emerged by default.
The Trappists, a seventeenth-century subgroup of the Cistercian Order, owned several monasteries throughout the Western Hemisphere. Like the Camaldolese and the Carthusians, they promised the rigorous kind of spiritual discipline and contemplative silence that appealed to Merton. Unlike the Carthusians, who had devised their own rule, the Trappists followed the more formalized Rule of Saint Benedict, written in the sixth century, which mandates, among other things, poverty; daily routines of prayer, confession, and worship; a strict obedience to one’s superiors; and stability, that is, remaining committed to the community. The Rule also provides detailed instructions on how monks should live day-to-day. Contrary to popular misconception, the Trappists do not require a “vow of silence,” though the Rule does urge monks to esteem “a spirit of silence.”7 What is called “necessary conversation” is allowed. Otherwise, the Trappists zealously maintain a hushed, meditative atmosphere.
•••
As a young musician might dream of taking center stage at Carnegie Hall, Thomas Merton pictured himself as a monk, and not just any monk, but a solitary hermit like the Camaldolese. Living as they did in those in rustic caves, they were a contemporary echo of the earliest eremites, like Anthony the Great and his companions, who, seventeen centuries earlier, sought God in the Egyptian desert. They, in turn, emulated John the Baptist and Christ himself, who went alone to the desert to fast and pray.
Why did the desert hold such allure for Merton? In a sense, the metaphorical desert had always been his home.
He came into the world without a country. Born in France to an American mother and a New Zealander father, he was brought to the United States as an infant. (He was a French citizen for most of his life, only applying for US citizenship a decade before his death, although he later considered renouncing that citizenship because of the US’s involvement in Vietnam.) After his mother died of stomach cancer when he was six, he accompanied his artist father to Bermuda. At age eleven, after more displacements, he was sent to a French boarding school, where he learned to cope with his loneliness by writing, daydreaming, and poking around the old churches in the area. It was a turning point. Writing, which began as an escape from solitude, became the valued product of it. Solitude was something to be sought.
When Merton was sixteen, his father died of a brain tumor, making orphans of him and his younger brother, Paul. At eighteen, Merton attended classes at Clare College, Cambridge, where he spent the next two years in a whirl of pub-hopping, womanizing, and, as if to keep things from falling apart, writing.
Determined to make something of himself, he returned to America to study at Columbia University. As at Cambridge, he again found himself among genial peers, only these students were destined to become some of the leading intellectuals of their generation. He was classmates with Robert Giroux, who became a renowned editor and Merton’s publisher; Ad Reinhardt, who became a leading abstract painter; Herman Wouk, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist; poet John Berryman, also a Pulitzer winner; and poet Robert Lax, who remained a lifelong friend. Merton’s primary mentor at Columbia was famed professor and award-winning poet Mark Van Doren, an intellectual of a fairly radical stripe and a spiritual bent, who later influenced such students as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.
At Columbia, Merton developed an interest in religion and wrote his thesis on nature and art in William Blake, a study of the theological aspects of the visionary’s work. Unbeknown to many of his friends, Merton joined the Catholic Church in November 1938 at age twenty-three and soon entertained the idea of becoming a monk. After running into him three years later, Robert Giroux was “stunned. . . . I had had no idea that Merton had undergone a religious conversion or that he was interested in Monasticism.”8
•••
No monk, least of all Thomas Merton, perceives of monastic solitude as an easy life. The desert, whether literal or metaphorical, is no place to retire. It is a demanding place, where life is lived at the sharpest possible point of awareness, where the true self, which lives in Christ, stands alone and naked before God. It is where life is lived most fully and consciously. In this way the hermit offers a living alternative to the chaos of society. As Merton later wrote,
The Desert Fathers did, in fact, meet the “problems of their time” in the sense that they were among the few who were ahead of their time, and opened the way for the development of a new man and a new society. . . . [Those] hermits who left the world as though escaping from a wreck, did not merely intend to save themselves. They knew that they were helpless to do any good for others as long as they floundered about in the wreckage. But once they got a foothold on solid ground, things were different. Then they had not only the power but even the obligation to pull the whole world to safety after them.9
The desert is where Saint Anthony, according to his ancient biographer, Athanasius, fought throngs of demons, served the other solitaries, dispensed wisdom, and thereby became the founder of Western monasticism. The desert is where Jesus encountered Satan and resisted the temptations of bread and security and earthly power, a sojourn that immediately preceded his three-year ministry of preaching and healing as recorded in the Gospels. Moses too went to the “inner parts of the desert” to find an endlessly burning bush that spoke his name and commanded him to lead the Israelites out of Egypt—an act that altered the course of history.10 By going to the desert, Anthony and Jesus and Moses did indeed “pull the whole world to safety after them.”
Merton’s Holy Week retreat opened a new world. On April 7, the day after his arrival at the abbey, he wrote in his journal, with some creative hyperbole:
I should tear out all the other pages of this book and all the other pages of everything else I ever wrote, and begin here.
This [monastery] is the center of America. I had wondered what was holding this country together, what has been keeping the universe from cracking in pieces and falling apart. It is this monastery. . . .
This is the only real city in America—in a desert.
It is the axle around which the whole country blindly turns.11
•••
The following fall, Merton contemplated leaving his teaching position to work with Catherine de Hueck Doherty, the Catholic social worker who had founded Friendship House in Harlem four years earlier. Friendship House was an interracial community, established to promote social justice and civil rights. After growing up as a wealthy Russian baroness, Doherty received what she felt was a powerful religious calling and in 1932 sold her possessions to finance her charity work. She gave a lecture at St. Bonaventure in the fall of 1941, and her forceful personality and engaging zeal so appealed to Merton that he volunteered “a couple of weeks of evenings”12 at Friendship House. Doherty urged him to join her.
And so Merton faced a choice. Would he work in Harlem among those marginalized by society or seek solitude as a monk? Overshadowing his decision was the fact that President Roosevelt had recently reinstated conscription. Although the country had not yet been pulled into the war, every male between the ages of twenty-one and forty-five was required to register for the draft. In March, one month before his Easter retreat, Merton, who had a low draft-lottery number, had gone for his army physical, and so certain was he of being drafted that he pondered his reply should an overbearing sergeant catch him writing and ask, “What do you think you’re doing?”13
Throughout the summer and fall, conscription remained a real if somewhat distant possibility. All that changed on December 7. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the time for escaping the wreckage had come.
Three days after the attack, Thomas Merton was on the bus to Kentucky. He would become a Trappist.
•••
Merton later described this bus ride as “the last lap of my journey into the desert.”14 Although Gethsemani was in a remote part of the state, he would eventually discover that the monastery was still a long way from the desert. When he had written in his journal that Gethsemani was “the only real city in America—in a desert,” he could not have foreseen the disappointment to come.
Seventeen years later, in preparing portions of that same journal for publication, he changed the phrase “in a desert” to “in the wilderness.”15 Perhaps he was clarifying that he was referring to a generalized wilderness, like Kentucky, much of which was still untouched by urban America. But another possibility is that the desert he had anticipated at Gethsemani—“the axle around which the country blindly turns”—turned out to be a mirage. The word desert implies something more sacred, more fundamental than wilderness. The desert was the holy ground where one could confront one’s most painful yearnings for union with God, where one could show the world “a new man and a new society.” By trading desert for wilderness, Merton was hinting that the abbey, while a quiet, spiritual place surrounded by rustic natural beauty, didn’t offer the kind of parched, holy solitude he longed for.
On December 13, three days after arriving at Gethsemani, he wrote a farewell poem to his friends in New York, and again he uses the desert image to portray his new life:
More than we fear, we love the holy desert
Where separate strangers, hid in their disguise,
Have come to meet by night the quiet Christ.16
These lines anticipate the tension Merton would live with for the next two decades. The desert is a holy place where Christ is encountered, but Merton sensed that those around him were strangers, hidden and disguised. In his journals, he would later rage on occasion against the “fictions and pretenses, all the façade and latent hypocrisy of the monastic community.”17 While the monastery might foreshadow the gathering of the faithful in heaven and was, in that sense, paradise, it wasn’t the desert, the place where the soul takes upon itself the existential loneliness of Christ. Merton had hoped for both paradise and the desert. He found mainly the former.
Nor was this the kind of paradise that could protect him from the wreckage of war.