Sunday, March 6, 1966
On a chilly Sunday evening, as the winter sun sinks behind thin gray clouds and, in the east, a full moon lurks just below the horizon, a man stands on the porch of a cabin in the woods. The sky is steely blue, the air filled with the scent of wood smoke from the chimney behind him. To the east, halfway down the snow-covered slope, five white-tailed deer have just stepped from the brush beyond the fence.1
The man has seen signs of them all winter: their tracks in the snow, their muddy hoof prints by the creek, and the depressions in the leaves where they warm themselves at night. Recently, as he walked the path, he caught sight of their white tails flapping “like flags” as they dashed off through the cedars and pines.2
Slowly he raises his binoculars. Fascinated by the wide-set eyes, soft black noses, and delicate movements, he wishes he could touch them. For a quarter of an hour he studies them, and they, in turn, glance nervously in his direction, pacing cautiously across the clearing, alert and searching for food as the long winter nears its end.
One doe raises a foreleg as if to spring back toward the woods, unsure about the human farther up the hill, but she doesn’t run. Gently she lowers her hoof, sniffs the air, then gracefully arches her neck toward the ground. At one point something startles the group, but they prance only a few steps away. That doe has an especially elegant trot, lifting her legs higher than the others.
This reminds the man of the day last fall when a badly wounded buck hobbled three-legged across this same clearing, when the man wept and felt a flash of anger toward the hunters who poach these woods. He remembers the incident a couple of years earlier when a deer tumbled into the local reservoir, and he watched helplessly as it struggled to climb out. He wrote a poem about it later.
The plank flooring on which he stands is often strewn with cracker crumbs, left for the juncos and chickadees, though the mice and squirrels usually get them first. An ax is propped against the wall, a broad wood stump serves as a stool and wood-splitting block, a few wooden chairs are scattered around the porch, and a stack of firewood leans unevenly against one of the three four-by-four posts that support the overhanging roof. Buckets collect the rainwater, which the man uses to wash his dishes.
He stands there gazing, peaceful though alert, full of wonder, and above all, patient. In the past two and a half decades he has had much practice in the art of patience.
Later that night at his desk, by the faint hum of a fluorescent desk lamp, he will recount in his journal his experience with the deer and conclude, “I was entranced by their perfection.”3
•••
For many writers, such a phrase would be a self-conscious attempt at poetry. But for Thomas Merton, the man who watched the deer through binoculars on the evening of March 6, 1966, words like entranced and perfection had spiritual significance, as if the creatures were still so warm from the forge of creation that every fleeting moment spent watching them was overflowing with the divine.
As a religious hermit, he relished such moments, when time seemed suspended, self-contained, when distractions and disappointments vanished like mist on Monk’s Pond at sunrise. He had moved to this cinder-block cabin seven months earlier for precisely these kinds of moments; they were part of his regimen of meditation and prayer. For him, simply being present in nature was prayer.
It had taken years to convince the church to let him move here—twenty-four, to be exact. A sort of ceaseless yearning had guided him to this place—or was it, as he believed, God’s will all along?
Perhaps he identified with those deer in some way. Like him, they were venturing alone into an open, vulnerable space and yet unwilling to move too far from the security of the woods. Merton had often tried to escape the shelter of the monastery, which was just a few minutes’ walk from his cabin. But escaping the protective canopy of the Catholic Church—that was something he could not do.
For now, the cabin was enough. In the cold twilight, he was here, fully awake, present, and alone, relishing this hard-won solitude.
Within weeks, he would be on the brink of losing it all.