The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition (67 page)

Already in the Christmas season I had half filled an old notebook that belonged to my Columbia days, with the ideas that came swimming into my head all through those wonderful feasts, when I was a postulant.

In fact, I had found that the interval after the night office, in the great silence, between four and five-thirty on the mornings of feast days, was a wonderful time to write verse. After two or three hours of prayer your mind is saturated in peace and the richness of the liturgy. The dawn is breaking outside the cold windows. If it is warm, the birds are already beginning to sing. Whole blocks of imagery seem to crystallize out as it were naturally in the silence and the peace, and the lines almost write themselves.

Or that was the way it went until Father Master told me I must not write poetry then. The Rule would keep that hour sacred for the study of Scripture and the Psalms. And as time went on, I found that this was even better than writing poems.

What a time that is for reading and meditation! Especially in the summer when you can take your book and go out under the trees. What shades of light and color fill the woods at May’s end. Such greens and blues as you never saw! And in the east the dawn sky is a blaze of fire where you might almost expect to see the winged animals of Ezechiel, frowning and flashing and running to and fro.

For six years, at that time of the day, on feast days, I have been reading nothing but one or another of some three or four books. St. Augustine’s Commentary on the Psalms, St. Gregory the Great’s Moralia, St. Ambrose on some of the Psalms or William of St. Thierry on the
Song of Songs.
Sometimes I look at one or another of the Fathers, or else read Scripture
simpliciter.
As soon as I had entered into the world of these great saints, and begun to rest in the Eden of their writings, I lost all desire to prefer that time for any writing of my own.

Such books as these, and the succession of our offices, and all the feasts and seasons of the liturgical year, and the various times of sowing and planting and harvesting, and, in general, all the varied and closely integrated harmony of natural and supernatural cycles that go to make up the Cistercian year tend to fill a man’s life to such overflowing satiety that there is usually no time, no desire for writing.

After the poems I wrote the first Christmas, and one or two in January, and one at the Purification, and one more in Lent, I was glad to be quiet. If there were no other reason for not writing, summer is too busy a season.

As soon as Paschal time was well begun, we were planting peas and beans, and when it ended we were picking them. Then in May they cut the first crop of alfalfa in St. Joseph’s field, and from then on the novices were going out, morning and afternoon, in their long line, Indian file, straw hats on their heads, with pitchforks to hay fields in all quarters of the farm. From St. Joseph’s we went to the upper bottom, in the extreme northeast corner of the property, in a hollow surrounded by woods, behind the knoll called Mount Olivet. After that we were down in the lower bottom, where I lifted up a shock of hay on the fork and a black snake tumbled out of it. When the big wagons were loaded, two or three of us would ride back and help unload them in the cow barn or the horse barn or the sheep barn. That is one of the hardest jobs we have around here. You get inside the huge, dark loft, and the dust begins to swirl and the ones on the wagon are pitching hay up at you as fast as they can, and you are trying to stow it back in the loft. In about two minutes the place begins to put on a very good imitation of purgatory, for the sun is beating down mercilessly on a tin roof over your head, and the loft is one big black stifling oven. I wish I had thought a little about that cow barn, back in the days when I was committing so many sins, in the world. It might have given me pause.

In June, when the Kentucky sun has worked up his full anger, and stands almost at the zenith, beating the clay furrows with his raging heat, it begins to be the season of the Cistercian’s true penance. It is then that the little green flag begins to appear in the small cloister to announce that we no longer have to wear our cowls in the intervals and in the refectory. But even then, no matter how motionless you remain, out under the trees, everything you have on is soaked in sweat: and the woods begin to sizzle with a thousand crickets, and their din fills the cloister court and echoes around the brick walls and the tiled floors of the cloister and makes the monastery sound like a gigantic frying pan standing over a fire. This is the time when the choir begins to fill with flies, and you have to bite your lip to keep your resolution about never swatting them, as they crawl over your forehead and into your eyes while you are trying to sing.... And yet it is a wonderful season, fuller of consolations than it is of trials: the season of the great feasts: Pentecost, Corpus Christi—when we pave the cloister with whole mosaics of flowers—the Sacred Heart, St. John the Baptist, Sts. Peter and Paul.

This is when you really begin to feel the weight of our so-called active contemplation, with all the accidental additions that it acquires at Gethsemani. You begin to understand the truth of the fact that the old Trappists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw in the “exercises of contemplation”—the choral office and mental prayer and so on—principally a means of penance and self-punishment. And so it is the season when novices give up and go back to the world—they give up at other times too, but summer is their hardest test.

My friend Frater Sacerdos had already left in May. I remember, a few days before he vanished from our midst, the novices were dusting the church, and he was mooning around St. Patrick’s altar with a woeful expression and great sighs and gestures. His former name, in religion, as a Carmelite, had been Patrick, and he was on the point of returning to the tutelage of the great apostle of Ireland.

But I had no desire to leave. I don’t think I enjoyed the heat any more than anybody else, but with my active temperament I could satisfy myself that all my work and all my sweat really meant something, because they made me feel as if I were doing something for God.

The day Frater Sacerdos left we were working in a new field that had just been cleared over near the western limits of the farm, behind Aidan Nally’s. And we came home in our long file over the hill past Nally’s house, with the whole blue valley spread out before us, and the monastery and all the barns and gardens standing amid the trees below us under a big blue sweep of Kentucky sky, with those white, incomparable clouds. And I thought to myself: “Anybody who runs away from a place like this is crazy.” But it was not as supernatural as I may have thought. It is not sufficient to love the place for its scenery, and because you feel satisfied that you are a spiritual athlete and a not inconsiderable servant of God.

Now, at the beginning of July, we were in the midst of the harvest, getting in the wheat. The big threshing machine was drawn up at the east end of the cow barn, and wagons loaded with sheaves were constantly coming in, from all directions, from the various fields. You could see the cellarer standing on top of the threshing machine, outlined against the sky, giving directions, and a group of lay brother novices were busily filling the sacks and tying them up and loading trucks as fast as the clean new grain poured out of the machine. Some of the choir novices were taking the grain down to the mill and unloading the sacks and spilling the wheat out on the granary floor: but most of us were out in the fields.

That year we had a phenomenal harvest: but it was always threatened with ruin by showers of rain. So practically every day the novices went out to the fields and dismantled the shocks and spread the damp sheaves around on the ground, in the sun, to dry before they began to get full of mildew: and then we would put them back together again and go home—and there would be another shower of rain. But in the end it was a good harvest, anyway.

How sweet it is, out in the fields, at the end of the long summer afternoons! The sun is no longer raging at you, and the woods are beginning to throw long blue shadows over the stubble fields where the golden shocks are standing. The sky is cool, and you can see the pale half-moon smiling over the monastery in the distance. Perhaps a clean smell of pine comes down to you, out of the woods, on the breeze, and mingles with the richness of the fields and of the harvest. And when the undermaster claps his hands for the end of work, and you drop your arms and take off your hat to wipe the sweat out of your eyes, in the stillness you realize how the whole valley is alive with the singing of crickets, a constant universal treble going up to God out of the fields, rising like the incense of an evening prayer to the pure sky:
laus perennis!

And you take your rosary out of your pocket, and get in your place in the long file, and start swinging homeward along the road with your boots ringing on the asphalt and deep, deep peace in your heart! And on your lips, silently, over and over again, the name of the Queen of Heaven, the Queen also of this valley: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee....” And the Name of her Son, for Whom all this was made in the first place, for Whom all this was planned and intended, for Whom the whole of creation was framed, to be His Kingdom. “Blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus!”

“Full of grace!” The very thought, over and over, fills our own hearts with more grace: and who knows what grace overflows into the world from that valley, from those rosaries, in the evenings when the monks are swinging home from work!

It was a few days after the Feast of the Visitation, which is, for me, the feast of the beginning of all true poetry, when the Mother of God sang her
Magnificat,
and announced the fulfilment of all prophecies, and proclaimed the Christ in her and became the Queen of Prophets and of poets—a few days after that feast, I got news from John Paul.

For the last few months he had been at a camp in the plains of the Canadian west, in Manitoba. Day after day he had been making long flights and doing bombing practice, and now he had his sergeant’s stripes and was ready to be sent overseas.

He wrote that he was coming to Gethsemani before he sailed. But he did not say when.

THE FEAST OF ST. STEPHEN HARDING, THE FOUNDER OF THE
Cistercian Order, went by, and every day I was waiting to be called to Reverend Father’s room, and told that John Paul had come.

By now the corn was high, and every afternoon we went out with hoes, to make war against our enemies, the morning-glories, in the cornfields. And every afternoon, I would disappear into those rows of green banners, and lose sight of everybody else, wondering how anybody would be able to find me if he were sent out there to bring me in with the news that my brother had come. Often you did not even hear the signal for the end of work, and frequently one or two of the more recollected novices would get left in the cornfield, hoeing away diligently in some remote corner, after everybody else had gone home.

But I have discovered from experience that the rule, in these things, is that what you are expecting always comes when you are not actually expecting it. So it was one afternoon that we were working close to the monastery, within the enclosure, weeding a patch of turnips, that someone made me a sign to come in to the house. I had so far forgotten the object of my expectations that it took me a moment or two before I guessed what it was.

I changed out of work-clothes and went straight to Reverend Father’s room and knocked on the door. He flashed the “Please wait” sign that is worked from a button at his desk, and so there was nothing for it but to sit down and wait, which I did, for the next half hour.

Finally Reverend Father discovered that I was there, and sent for my brother, who presently came along the hall with Brother Alexander. He was looking very well, and standing very straight, and his shoulders, which were always broad, were now completely square.

As soon as we were alone in his room, I began to ask him if he didn’t want to get baptized.

“I sort of hoped I could be,” he said.

“Tell me,” I said, “how much instruction have you had, anyway?”

“Not much,” he said.

After I had questioned him some more, it turned out that “not much” was a euphemism for “none at all.”

“But you can’t be baptized without knowing what it is all about,” I said.

I went back to the novitiate before vespers feeling miserable.

“He hasn’t had any instruction,” I said gloomily to Father Master.

“But he wants to be baptized, doesn’t he?”

“He says he does.”

Then I said: “Don’t you think I could give him enough instruction in the next few days to prepare him? And Father James could talk to him when he gets a chance. And of course he can go to all the conferences of the retreat.”

One of the week-end retreats was just beginning.

“Take him some books,” said Father Master, “and talk to him, and tell him everything you can. And I’ll go and speak to Reverend Father.”

So the next day I hurried up to John Paul’s room with a whole armful of volumes purloined from the Novitiate Common Box—and soon he had a room full of all kinds of books that different people had selected for him to read. If he had wanted to read them all, he would have had to stay in the monastery for six months. There was an orange pamphlet with an American flag on the cover, called “The Truth About Catholics.” There were, of course,
The Imitation of Christ
and a New-Testament. Then my contribution was the Catechism of the Council of Trent, and Father Robert’s suggestion was
The Faith of Millions and
Father James had come through with the
Story of a Soul,
the autobiography of the Little Flower. There were plenty of others besides, for Father Francis, who was guest-master that year, was also librarian. Perhaps he was the one who supplied the
Story of a Soul,
for he has great devotion to the Little Flower.

But in any case, John Paul looked them all over. He said: “Who is this Little Flower, anyway?” And he read the
Story of a Soul
all in one gulp.