On April 17, 1943, the day before Palm Sunday, Merton’s only sibling, Paul, an airman in the Royal Canadian Air Force, died in a plane crash over the English Channel. The previous summer, Paul had visited Gethsemani and expressed a desire to become a Catholic, and so he was baptized in a local church. It was the last time the two brothers saw each other. In a poem dedicated to Paul, Merton wrote, “In the wreckage of your April Christ lies slain, / And Christ weeps in the ruins of my spring.”1
With the last of his immediate family gone, Merton, who now went by his monastic name, Brother Louis, dedicated himself to his vocation with renewed abandon. Like all monks, he began his time at the monastery as a postulant. After a few years, postulants become novices and then, upon taking solemn vows, become full-fledged members of the community. Merton knew that not all postulants make it that far, and he was determined to maintain the momentum that had propelled him through the front gates. He focused on his responsibilities to God and the abbey’s superiors and threw himself into learning as much as he could about the order. He settled into daily routine, hoping that his uneasiness with the place would dissipate.
To a certain extent it did. All able-bodied monks were required to work, though Merton, by a special dispensation from the abbot, Dom Frederic Dunne, was encouraged to write for an hour or two each day, often while the other monks attended to the abbey’s cheese, fudge, and fruitcake production and care of livestock. Some within the order resented Dunne’s decision. The Rule of Saint Benedict clearly states that an abbot should “make no distinction of persons in the monastery. Let him not love one more than another.”2 Some also assumed that the kind of conversation discouraged by the Rule included such public conversation as writing and publishing. Merton’s editor, Robert Giroux, later wrote that “Merton received hate-mail denouncing him as a ‘talking Trappist.’”3 A monk is expected to speak little and practice simplicity, humility, and inner tranquility—qualities not often associated with highly creative people.
But like all monasteries, the abbey had to support itself, and Father Dunne saw promise in the talented postulant; the arrangement might prove mutually beneficial. While the writing might bring in a small income for the abbey, it might also distract Merton from the disappointments that lurked in its shadows. So, during those early years at Gethsemani he continued to write poetry and completed two hagiographies on behalf of the order, one about an early twentieth-century Trappistine and the other about a medieval Cistercian nun. Merton disliked both books intensely. “Where did I get all that pious rhetoric?” he asked.4
The arrangement also gave him time to compose the first draft of a lengthy book about his own life, something the abbot not only encouraged but instructed him to do. As the writing progressed, Merton contacted an old friend from college, Naomi Burton Stone, who had been his literary agent back in his pre-Trappist days when he was writing fiction and poetry. When he entered the monastery, she had assumed his literary life was over, but when approached anew, she was delighted to renew the partnership. It was a simple matter for her to contact their mutual friend from Columbia, Robert Giroux, who was now an acquiring editor at Harcourt, Brace and Company.
But Merton couldn’t completely distract himself with his writing. How often he second-guessed his vocation as a Trappist in his first five years at Gethsemani is unknown because he destroyed his journals from that time. The first mention he makes of his continuing disappointment occurs only days after he resumed his journal in December 1946. Just after Christmas, he told his confessor that his greatest desire was to leave Gethsemani and become a Carthusian, an order that encouraged, even compelled, its monks to become solitaries. The confessor responded, not unkindly, that Merton was “full of self-love and only some very extraordinary upheaval . . . would justify [Merton’s] leaving.” Furthermore, he advised Merton to treat it like any other “unordered appetite”—that is, try not to be too upset about it.5
That same day, coincidentally, during the midday meal, a telegram arrived from Stone. Dreading that it would bring the news that his manuscript had been rejected, Merton waited until later that afternoon to open it.
It read, “Manuscript accepted. Happy New Year.”6
•••
In 1947 Thomas Merton was an obscure monk living in an obscure monastery in rural Kentucky. Although he had already published four books—two volumes of poetry and two religious biographies, they were all issued in small print runs with little fanfare. This new book was a major project for a leading publisher, and it contained Merton’s most personal writing yet.
The year was taken up with waiting, editing galleys, working on more books, and wrestling with church censors. One censor suggested that Merton was “not yet capable of writing such a book” and recommended instead that he “take a correspondence course in grammar.” More to the point, wrote Merton, “he also objected to my frankness about my past.”7 Merton, like Saint Augustine in the fourth century, had had affairs with women and, also like Augustine, had fathered a child.8 Still, Augustine’s Confessions did not have to defer to a review board to receive imprimatur.9 This would not be Merton’s last run-in with censorship.
Apart from such distractions, he spent much of that year daydreaming about the Carthusians. Even something as simple as a chest cold inflamed his desire. On March 19, 1947, after spending part of the day sick in bed, he wrote:
All afternoon I sat on the bed rediscovering the meaning of contemplation, rediscovering God, rediscovering myself. . . .
It has been one of the most wonderful days I have ever known in my life. . . . I know this is the way I ought to be living: with my mind and sense silent. . . .
Once again the question arises: is it possible to be quiet in an atmosphere like the one in this house? Should I move somewhere where I can find solitude and silence and peace to be alone with God in this pure tranquility that is impossible for a Cistercian? . . .
God is hidden within me. I find Him by hiding in the silence in which He is concealed. . . .
I go to say Matins of Our Lady of Sorrows.10
•••
Merton had not yet been ordained a priest. That wouldn’t happen until two years later, in May of 1949. For now he was living as a novice under solemn vows. In the usual order of things, a postulant enters the monastery under what are called “simple vows,” a testing period and time of discernment. After five or six years, if the postulant proves worthy and capable of enduring the rigors of monastic life, the order invites him to become a novice under “solemn vows.” Merton took his in March 1947. Solemn vows are more binding than simple vows. Some scholars of canon law argue that not even the pope can undo them. Some assert that if a monk leaves the order and abandons his vow of chastity, for instance, no subsequent marriage can ever be recognized by the church—a rule that would become more relevant to Merton two decades later, in the summer of 1966.
Merton’s solemn vows were a way for the monastery to strengthen its authority over him, to reassure itself of his commitment, his stability. It was also Merton’s way of convincing himself that the Trappist order, not the Carthusian, was God’s will after all.
But such resolutions proved difficult. In August of that year, Merton discovered that a Benedictine monk who had conducted a workshop at the abbey two years earlier had been allowed to leave his order to go to Spain—to become a Carthusian. Merton commented, “The dog!”11 But when one of the novices at Gethsemani left for England against his superiors’ wishes, hoping to be accepted by a Carthusian abbey there, Merton’s reaction was not so whimsical. “It is like having something stuck into my heart,”12 he wrote. For the next couple of weeks, he prayed for God’s will, vacillating between staying at Gethsemani and becoming a solitary elsewhere.
Then another thought occurred. Perhaps there was another solution. By late October 1947, Merton had grown curious about one particular aspect of Trappist life. Although the order had occasionally sanctioned solitaries in previous centuries, were modern Trappists ever allowed to live alone outside the walls? He had recently heard about a monk named Dom Alexis Presse, who lived as a hermit in France, but only after leaving the Cistercian order entirely. Dom Alexis had been assigned the task of repairing portions of a ruined monastery in Brittany, apparently single-handedly. The French government contributed a million francs to the quixotic project, reminiscent of Saint Francis’s rebuilding of the San Damiano Chapel.
Masking the fact that the idea of being a church-refurbishing hermit actually intrigued him, Merton wrote in his journal, “I am not attracted to it, . . . a rigid imitation of the twelfth century.” But the idea of living as a solitary haunted him. In that same entry, he pushed away the possibility by asserting that he had no desire other than to continue his present life as a monk, uniting himself “to God’s will for here and now, and here and now it is Gethsemani and all that goes with it.”13 By stating and restating “here and now,” he inserted a loophole; it was his way of saying, “Not now, but someday.”
So Merton asked Dom Frederic directly: Did Cistercians have to leave the order to live as hermits, or could they remain in the order and live alone outside the walls? Dom Frederic, in his genial way, informed him that the Cistercians could indeed live as hermits, and he proceeded to give Merton several examples—all of them discouraging. One Cistercian, said the abbot, had no sooner settled into his hermitage than he came to be regarded by the locals as a holy man and was besieged by people seeking advice. He had to return to the monastery to find peace. Another Trappist in a certain Southern state had become a hermit but soon “sheepishly” returned to the abbey “shaved.”14 Though Merton was unsure what “shaved” meant, he conjectured that it might have come about as the result of a run-in with the local hillbillies; Catholicism was still an alien sect in parts of the South. In another story, a hermit in Oklahoma returned to his abbey one day and proceeded to enlighten the abbot about how to better manage the place. The abbot quietly instructed another monk to go out into the woods and burn the proud hermit’s hut to the ground. The hermit was forced to return to the abbey and, as far as Merton knew, practiced a self-imposed vow of silence by never speaking to the abbot again.
By December, Merton was understandably dejected. He decided that his urge to become a hermit was a “self-deception” and a sign of disobedience. “I have come to give too large a place to my own desires.”15 Nevertheless, he resolved to take renewed advantage of the limited solitude his life at Gethsemani afforded him. And to keep writing.
He had no idea that in a year and a half he would have an experience that would shape his life every bit as dramatically as the publication of his first best-selling book. On June 26, 1949, as Merton described the event, “I went to Reverend Father and we were talking about solitude, and quite by surprise, he gave me permission to go out of the enclosure into the woods by myself.”16
A day outside the walls—it was a small thing, but it was life-changing. It was the first time Merton had been allowed outside the monastery alone since arriving at Gethsemani seven and a half years earlier. So excited was Merton by the prospect of this walk in the woods that he dreamed about it during meridienne—his midday siesta. The dream was confused and anxiety producing, which made his glee more intense when he awoke with the prospect of an afternoon’s freedom before him. And “it was nothing at all like the dream.”17
He set out. First he climbed a nearby hill to contemplate the abbey from afar—a much-needed perspective. Suddenly and unexpectedly, it seemed beautiful to him from that distance. “It made much more sense in its surroundings.”18
The day was overcast, threatening a storm. Thunder rumbled in the west. As the wind grew gustier, he trekked across the open fields and tramped over the wooded hills and down into ravines. He knew he’d have to return as soon as the rain blew in, but as he continued to skirt the knobs and pastures, he felt the Spirit of God calling him deeper into the woods. Though he knew the danger and used to be terrified by storms, Merton now felt fearless. “As soon as I get away from people the Presence of God invades me.” Seldom had he felt so happy, with “the sweet scent of the woods—the clean stream, the peace, the inviolate solitude.”19
He pondered. A retreat center might be built on one of these hills someday, a place that could serve as a hermitage. It was a pipe dream, but a formative one. As if by a divine dispensation, the rain held off until Merton returned to the abbey for Vespers.
For one afternoon, he stood on the mountain and saw the desert spread out before him, as if God were saying to him, as he had once said to Moses, “This is the land. . . . Thou hast seen it with thine eyes.”20