The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition (64 page)

“That’s what I’ve been doing,” he said, “praying for you.”

T
HE MONASTERY IS A SCHOOL—A SCHOOL IN WHICH WE
learn from God how to be happy. Our happiness consists in sharing the happiness of God, the perfection of His unlimited freedom, the perfection of His love.

What has to be healed in us is our true nature, made in the likeness of God. What we have to learn is love. The healing and the learning are the same thing, for at the very core of our essence we are constituted in God’s likeness by our freedom, and the exercise of that freedom is nothing else but the exercise of disinterested love—the love of God for His own sake, because He is God.

The beginning of love is truth, and before He will give us His love, God must cleanse our souls of the lies that are in them. And the most effective way of detaching us from ourselves is to make us detest ourselves as we have made ourselves by sin, in order that we may love Him reflected in our souls as He has re-made them by His love.

That is the meaning of the contemplative life, and the sense of all the apparently meaningless little rules and observances and fasts and obediences and penances and humiliations and labors that go to make up the routine of existence in a contemplative monastery: they all serve to remind us of what we are and Who God is—that we may get sick of the sight of ourselves and turn to Him: and in the end, we will find Him in ourselves, in our own purified natures which have become the mirror of His tremendous Goodness and of His endless love....

SO BROTHER MATTHEW LOCKED THE GATE BEHIND ME AND I
was enclosed in the four walls of my new freedom.

And it was appropriate that the beginning of freedom should be as it was. For I entered a garden that was dead and stripped and bare. The flowers that had been there last April were all gone. The sun was hidden behind low clouds and an icy wind was blowing over the grey grass and the concrete walks.

In a sense my freedom had already begun, for I minded none of these things. I did not come to Gethsemani for the flowers, or for the climate—although I admit that the Kentucky winters were a disappointment. Still, I had not had time to plan on any kind of a climate. I had been too busy with the crucially important problem of finding out God’s will. And that problem was still not entirely settled.

There still remained the final answer: would I be accepted into this monastery? Would they take me in to the novitiate, to become a Cistercian?

Father Joachim, the guest master, came out the door of the monastery and crossed the garden with his hands under his scapular and his eyes fixed on the cement walk. He only raised them when he was near me and then he grinned.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said. I suppose he had been doing some praying for me too.

I did not give him a chance to ask if I had come to stay. I said: “Yes, Father, this time I want to be a novice—if I can.”

He just smiled. We went into the house. The place seemed very empty. I put the suitcase down in the room that had been assigned to me, and hastened to the church.

If I expected any grand welcome from Christ and His angels, I did not get it—not in the sensible order. The huge nave was like a tomb, and the building was as cold as ice. However, I did not mind. Nor was I upset by the fact that nothing special came into my head in the way of a prayer. I just knelt there more or less dumb, and listened to the saw down at the sawmill fill the air with long and strident complaints and the sound of labor.

That evening at supper I found that there was another postulant—an ancient, toothless, grey-haired man hunched up in a huge sweater. He was a farmer from the neighborhood who had lived in the shadow of the abbey for years and had finally made up his mind to enter it as a lay brother. However, he did not stay.

The next day I found out there was still a third postulant. He arrived that morning. He was a fat bewildered youth from Buffalo. Like myself, he was applying for the choir. Father Joachim put the two of us to work together washing dishes and waxing floors, in silence. We were both absorbed in our own many thoughts, and I dare say he was no more tempted to start a conversation than I was.

In fact every minute of the day I was secretly congratulating myself that conversations were over and done with—provided always I was accepted.

I could not be quite sure whether someone would call me and tell me to go down for an interview with the Father Abbot, or whether I was expected to go down to him on my own initiative, but that part of the problem was settled for me towards the end of the morning work.

I went back to my room and started puzzling my head over the copy of the
Spiritual Directory
that Father Joachim had brought me. Instead of settling down quietly and reading the chapter that directly concerned me, the one that said what postulants were supposed to do while they were waiting in the Guest House, I started leafing through the two thin volumes to see if I could not discover something absolutely clear and definite as to what the Cistercian vocation was all about.

It is easy enough to say, “Trappists are called to lead lives of prayer and penance,” because after all there is a sense in which everybody is called to lead that kind of a life. It is also easy enough to say that Cistercians are called to devote themselves entirely to contemplation without any regard for the works of the active life: but that does not say anything precise about the object of our life and it certainly does not distinguish the Trappists from any of the other so-called “contemplative Orders.” Then the question always arises: “What do you mean by contemplation, anyway?”

From the
Spiritual Directory
I learned that “the Holy Mass, the Divine Office, Prayer and pious reading which form the exercises of the contemplative life occupy the major part of our day.”

It was a frigid and unsatisfying sentence. The phrase “pious reading” was a gloomy one, and somehow the thought that the contemplative life was something that was divided up into “exercises” was of a sort that would have ordinarily depressed me. But I think I had come to the monastery fully resigned to the prospect of meeting that kind of language for the rest of my life. In fact, it is a good thing that I was re-signed to it, for it is one of the tiresome minor details of all religious life today, that one must receive a large proportion of spiritual nourishment dished up in the unseasoned jargon of transliterated French.

I had no way of saying what the contemplative life meant to me then. But it seemed to me that it should mean something more than spending so many hours a day in a church and so many more hours somewhere else, without having to go to the bother of preaching sermons or teaching school or writing books or visiting the sick.

A few lines further on in the
Directory
there were some cautious words about mystical contemplation which, I was told, was “not required” but which God sometimes “vouchsafed.” That word “vouchsafe”! It almost sounded as if the grace came to you dressed up in a crinoline. In fact, to my way of interpreting it, when a spiritual book tells you that “infused contemplation is sometimes vouchsafed” the idea you are supposed to get is this: “infused contemplation is all right for the saints, but as for
you:
hands off!” The original French of the
Directory
is not so icy as the translation, and the book goes on to add that monks can ask God for these graces, if they do so with a right intention, and that the Cistercian life should normally be a perfect preparation for them. In fact, the French edition also adds that the Cistercian has the
duty
of leading the kind of life that would dispose him for mystical prayer.

And yet I was left with the impression that contemplation in a Trappist monastery was liable to be pretty much
secundum quid
and that if I had a secret desire for what the lingo of the pious manuals would call the “summits” I had better be cautious about the way I manifested it. Under other circumstances the situation might have disturbed me: but now it did not bother me at all. After all, it was largely a theoretical question anyway. All that I needed to worry about was to do God’s will, to enter the monastery if I were allowed to do so, and take things as I found them, and if God wanted to do any of this “vouchsafing” He could go ahead and “vouchsafe.” And all the other details would take care of themselves.

As I was laying aside the
Directory
to take up another small volume of pidgin English, someone knocked on the door.

It was a monk I had not seen before, a rather burly man with white hair and an extremely firm jaw, who introduced himself as the Master of Novices. I took another look at the determination in that jaw and said to myself “I bet he doesn’t take any nonsense from novices, either.”

But as soon as he started to talk I found that Father Master was full of a most impressive simplicity and gentleness and kindness and we began to get along together very well from that hour. He was not a man that stood on ceremony and he would have nothing to do with the notorious technique of elaborately staged humiliations which have given La Trappe a bad name in the past. By those standards he should have walked into the room and slammed the door with an insult and then asked me if I were entering the monastery in order to get away from the police.

But he just sat down and said: “Does the silence scare you?”

I almost fell over myself in my eagerness to assure him that the silence not only did not scare me but that I was entranced with it and already felt myself to be in heaven.

“Aren’t you cold in here?” he asked. “Why don’t you shut the window? Is that sweater warm enough?”

I assured him with consummate bravery that I was as warm as toast but he made me shut the window anyway.

Of course, what had happened was that Brother Fabian, who worked in the Guest House that year, had been feeding me with horror stories about how cold it was when you got up in the morning and went creeping down to choir with your knees knocking together and your teeth chattering so loud that you could hardly hear the prayers. So I was trying to get myself in trim for the ordeal by sitting with the windows open, without a coat on.

“Have you ever learned any Latin?” asked Father Master. I told him all about Plautus and Tacitus. He seemed satisfied.

After that we talked about many other things. Could I sing? Did I speak French? What made me want to become a Cistercian? Had I ever read anything about the Order? Had I ever read the
Life of St. Bernard by
Dom Ailbe Luddy?—and a lot of other things like that.

It was such a pleasant conversation that I was getting to be more and more unwilling to unload the big shadowy burden that still rested on my conscience, and tell this good Trappist all the things about my life before my conversion that had once made me think I could not possibly have a vocation to the priesthood. However, I finally did so in a few sentences.

“How long is it since you were baptized?” said Father Master.

“Three years, Father.”

He did not seem to be disturbed. He just said that he liked the way I had told him all that there was to be told, and that he would consult Father Abbot about it. And that was all.

I was still half expecting to be called down for a cross-examination by the First Superior, but that never came. The Fat Boy from Buffalo and I waxed floors for the next couple of days, and went down to church and knelt at the benches in front of St. Joseph’s altar while the monks chanted the Office, and then came back to the Guest House to eat our scrambled eggs and cheese and milk. At what Brother Fabian would have described as our “last meal,” he slipped us each a bar of Nestle’s chocolate, and afterwards whispered to me:

“Tom, I think you are going to be very disappointed with what you see on the table when you go into the refectory this evening ...”

That evening? It was the Feast of St. Lucy and a Saturday. I went back to the room and nibbled on the chocolate and copied out a poem I had just written by way of a farewell to Bob Lax and Mark Van Doren. Father Joachim came in and hid his face behind his hands to laugh when I told him what I was doing.

“A
poem
?” he said, and hastened out of the room.

He had come to get me to wax the floors some more, so presently the Fat Boy from Buffalo and I were on our knees again in the hall, but not for very long. Father Master came up the stairs and told us to get our things together and follow him.

So we put on our coats and got our bags and started downstairs, leaving Father Joachim to finish waxing the floor by himself.

The noise of our footsteps resounded in the great stair well. Down at the bottom of the flight, by the door, under the sign that said “God Alone” there were half a dozen local farmers standing around with their hats in their hands. They were waiting to go to confession. It was a kind of an anonymous, abstract delegation bidding us farewell in the name of civil society. As I passed one of them, a solemn polite old man with a four days’ growth of beard, I suddenly got a somewhat melodramatic impulse and leaned over towards him whispering:

“Pray for me.”

He nodded gravely that he was willing to do that, and the door closed behind us leaving me with the sense that my last act as a layman in the world still smacked of the old Thomas Merton who had gone around showing off all over two different continents.

The next minute we were kneeling by the desk of the man who had absolute temporal and spiritual authority over the monastery and everybody in it. This priest, who had been a Trappist for nearly fifty years, looked much younger than he was because he was so full of life and nervous energy. They had been fifty years of hard work which, far from wearing him out, had only seemed to sharpen and intensify his vitality.

Dom Frederic was deep in a pile of letters which covered the desk before him, along with a mountain of other papers and documents. Yet you could see that this tremendous volume of work did not succeed in submerging him. He had it all under control. Since I have been in the monastery I have often had occasion to wonder by what miracle he manages to
keep
all that under control. But he does.