Thomas Merton
Dancing in the Water of Life
Seeking Peace in the Hermitage
EDITED BY ROBERT E. DAGGY
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I: Living as a Part-time Solitary
August 1963–June 1964
PART II: The Suzuki Visit
June 1964
PART III: The Joy and Absurdity of Increasing Solitude
June 1964–April 1965
PART IV: Day of a Stranger
Sometime in May 1965
PART V: “Hermit in the Water of Life”
May 1965–December 1965
APPENDIX: Some Personal Notes
End of 1965
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Books by Thomas Merton
Copyright
About the Publisher
Acknowledgments
As director of the Thomas Merton Studies Center at Bellarmine College in Louisville, Kentucky, for more than twenty years, I have long been aware of the interest in Thomas Merton’s “personal journals” and the anticipation that awaited their release twenty-five years after his death in 1968. When the restriction against publication ended in 1993, I was pleased that the Trustees of the Merton Legacy Trust named Brother Patrick Hart as general editor for the publication of the Journals. I immediately accepted when he asked me to edit the fifth of the seven projected volumes. As I come to write these acknowledgments, I realize that all the people I wish to thank are special people to me, special beyond their help and support through the years of my tenure at the Merton Center. They are my friends and they have been a great grace to me.
Brother Patrick Hart’s place in Merton studies was, of course, already assured. The general editorship of the Journals simply caps his already distinguished contributions to Merton studies. That he offered support and helpful suggestions in the preparation of this volume goes without saying, for he is supportive and helpful with every Merton project. Most remarkable to me is that in over twenty years of cooperating on Merton affairs no cross word or tense moment has ever passed between us–a tribute more to him than to me.
It has been my pleasure to work with the trustees of the Merton Legacy Trust–Naomi Burton Stone (Emeritus), Robert Giroux, James Laughlin, and Tommie O’Callaghan. Anne H. McCormick, administrator of rights and contracts for the Trust, has handled Trust business in which I was involved with efficiency and dispatch. I must say a special word about Tommie O’Callaghan, whom I met at a business lunch in 1973. It is she who, in her words and mine, “found me” and “gave me my great opportunity” at the Merton Center. Though I may not always have felt gratitude for that opportunity in moments of stress and distraction, it is quite true that I would not have had the privilege of editing this volume (or the Merton letters and other Merton material) if I had not eaten Kentucky barbecue with her many years ago. For all the good things, Merton-related and otherwise, that knowing her and her husband, Frank, have brought me, I have genuine gratitude.
Several people provided help with the editing of this volume of the Journals. Most significant is Gregory J. Ryan of Wall Township, New Jersey, who introduced himself to me at the Merton Conference at Columbia University in 1978 and became a charter member of my own “Merton web.” He has helped with many projects since then, but his prodigious efforts in the preliminary transcription of this volume made my task of final transcription and editing far easier. His facility with Merton’s handwritten English is remarkable, though he eschewed attempting to decipher Merton’s difficult handwriting in other languages. For help with those transcriptions and translations I must thank other friends: Miguel Grinberg of Buenos Aires (for his own Spanish); Frank Donates of Chicago, sometime of Havana (Spanish); Lawrence S. Cunningham of Notre Dame University (Latin); and Beverly Marmion and Robert Wardell of Louisville (French).
Jonathan Montaldo, editor of Volume 2, Entering the Silence, entered my life when he wrote his master’s thesis on Merton in 1974 and I am lucky he has not left it. He transcribed several of Merton’s “Working Notebooks,” including #17, several years ago. I am grateful to him for allowing that transcription to be used, in part, as an appendix in this volume. I appreciate the efforts of Rosalind Parnes, reference librarian at Bellarmine College, the first colleague with whom I lunched after coming to the Center and with whom I still lunch. She checked and rechecked databases and other sources to help identify the often obscure authors and books that Merton was reading as he wrote these journal pages. Finally, my sometime partner and longtime companion, Michael J. Drury, assisted me with computer entry of the text, allaying my doubts and soothing my frequent frustrations. For this and so much more, I am grateful to him beyond words.
Introduction
There was an old man of Whitehaven
Who danced a quadrille with a raven.
But they said: It’s absurd
To encourage this bird.
So they smashed that old man of Whitehaven.
Charles Lear
Thomas Merton copied this Lear limerick into a 1964 “Reading Notebook” during the period when he was writing this volume of his private journals, dated “August 1963–End 1965.” Written regularly (but not day by day) and without major interruption, the journal covers a period when Merton had been in the monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani for more than twenty years, in which he passed his fiftieth birthday, and in which he began a new style of life and monasticism in what he called the hermitage. Merton is one of the most noted spiritual writers and masters of our time. While the journal offers abundant insights into and queries about the spiritual life, Merton lets us see that it is no easy task to find spiritual, or even physical, peace. His own struggle to accomplish the task is a consistent Merton theme and it provides the framework for this journal.
Charles Lear’s limerick encapsulates in a fanciful, yet serious, way Merton’s mood during these two and a half years. Merton, while undoubtedly amused by the limerick, probably copied it because he identified himself with the “old man of Whitehaven.” We can imagine, first of all, that “Whitehaven” in Merton’s mind is a play on “New Haven,” a small town just over the knobs from Gethsemani. Next, Merton began in this period to think of himself as an “old man,” stemming in part no doubt from his turning fifty but also from what he knew was diminishing physical well-being and energy. He was growing old, he thought, and yet resolution of the circumstances and activities of his life had reached only uneasy and uncertain solution. As he bobbed up and down the knob called Mount Olivet on his way from the monastery to the hermitage and back, Merton was, in the jargon of today’s youth, “having a dance in his own head.” Like the old man of Whitehaven, Merton found himself in a kind of cerebral “quadrille,” whirling around seemingly without purpose or direction.
The raven has historically been a bird of ambivalent image–sometimes helpful, sometimes ominous, sometimes deadly. Ravens fed the prophet Elijah when he hid from wicked Queen Jezebel in the wilderness. Frequently depicted as a companion of St. Benedict, the raven acts as a protector of all who follow Benedict’s monastic Rule (which Merton as a Cistercian of the Strict Observance did). On the other hand, the raven is also a bird of prey, one of the “birds of appetite” of Buddhist lore, a scavenger, a carrion eater, and often a precursor of doom. Certainly not graceful on the ground, the raven symbolizes the ambivalence and awkwardness that persist in Merton as he “dances” with specters of his own creation–the specters of anger, angst, agitation, and alienation that he cannot seem to exorcise from within himself. As he dances, he himself ravens (in another sense of the word), seeking and attempting to seize gratification as
monk, solitary, and writer. He “rapaciously” indulges his own will through what he sees but cannot seem to stop as indecision, procrastination, drift, and vacillation.
Merton saw much in his life and in the world around him that was absurd. The word “absurd,” in fact, recurs with frequency in this journal. In the limerick, “they”–that inevitable “they” who, we may assume, are the arbiters of what is proper and “normal”–think the raven is the problem and that the dancer’s encouraging the bird is absurd. Yet, for Merton, the monk must encourage dancing with the raven in order to reconcile the absurdity in himself. “They” want to stop the quadrille, and they try to end it, not by doing anything to the raven, but by smashing the “old man of Whitehaven,” he who encourages the protective yet rapacious bird to dance. There is no doubt that Merton continually felt “smashed” in this period, especially by his efforts to deal with the specters indicating that his writing, his vocation, his solitude were self-indulgent rather than genuine. Forces from outside the monastery continually smashed him: publishing business, visitors, peace movements, and ecumenical conferences. Merton may have perceived Dom James Fox, abbot of Gethsemani, as the chief “smasher” within the monastery, but disgruntlement with the monastic complex was almost equally as smashing. The continuing tension between dancing and smashing–between contentment and curtailment–helps to account for the highs and the lows, the joy and the despair, the enthusiasm and the carping that come through in this volume. Smashed Merton may have been at times, but the quadrille went on in his head and he could not seem to stop dancing with the raven. He could not stop the absurdity.
“Absurd” was one of the buzzwords of the 1960s and it is not surprising that Merton picked it up or that he was familiar with literature depicting the absurd. He delved into the French movement called the Theater of the Absurd, particularly in his reading of Eugène Ionesco. He said of Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros: “To be the last man in the rhinoceros herd is, in fact, to be a monster…solitude and dissent become more and more impossible, more and more absurd” (Raids on the Unspeakable, p. 20). He read Paul Goodman’s fairly popular book, Growing Up Absurd, which meshed in many ways with his own view of American society. Over and over in his journal, he speaks of what is absurd in the world, but more importantly, of what is absurd in his own life. In one entry (November 12, 1963) he says:
What a weary, silly mess. When will I learn to go without leaving footprints? A long way from that: I still love recognition and need to preach, so that I will believe in my own message, and believing that, will believe in myself–or at least consent to find myself acceptable for a little while. Absurdity, and very dishonest on top of it. I wish I knew how to be otherwise! Funny how I came to this, quite in spite of myself and in spite of everything, after several days of desperation (half-felt) and perplexity.
Events such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy he quite naturally finds “absurd” (November 23, 1963). He speaks of the “pompous absurdity” of pontifical masses at the monastery, which were too fussy for him (August 20, 1963). The war in Vietnam is, of course, “absurd” (April 27, 1965). He finds writing a text for the Vatican pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair “absurd” (February 2, 1964); finds it “absurd” that a solitary should be “accountable for what he says” (Appendix); and frets about “the absurd ritual of wastepaper,” of producing too much paper as he cleans out his office when he “departs” for the hermitage (August 17, 1965). He finds wanting to be young again “absurd” (December 21, 1965) and even his own “nausea” (a word he picks up from reading the French existentialists) with things “absurd.” Perhaps the most telling is when he writes on the eve of his departure to live in the hermitage: “The revelation of futility and interminable self-contradiction. What a poor being I am. If I try to conceive myself as, on top of all this, ‘being a hermit’ absurdity reaches its culmination. Yet I am convinced that I am on the right way” (August 17, 1965).
The narrative of the journal centers on the eventual move to the small concrete-block structure on Mount Olivet that Merton called “The Hermitage.” The abbot of Gethsemani, Dom James Fox, gradually permits him to spend more and more daylight hours at the hermitage. He eventually allows him to sleep there and tantalizes him with, hints of even more “privileges.” Finally, late in August 1965, he replaces Merton as Novice Master and grants him permission to live “full time” on Mount Olivet. His first official day as a hermit was August 20, 1965. On the surface Merton had at last achieved the solitude for which he had searched, struggled, and prayed so long. To a certain extent, even in his own active and continually questioning mind, he had.
Merton loves the hermitage and its surroundings, though there are, of course, some “problems.” He had said while spending only partial days there: “I talk to myself, I dance around the hermitage, I sing” (December 4, 1964). He revels in God’s creation and in his creatures (particularly deer, squirrels, and birds) and enjoys being part of that creation with them. The journal is filled with descriptions of the weather, becoming at times almost daily reports from the hermitage porch. Weather itself constitutes an integral part of his solitude. He finds “peace,” for example, “in seeing the hills, the blue sky, the afternoon sun.” The rain, especially, intrigues him and surfaces as a theme in his writing–for example, in the superb essay “Rain and the Rhinoceros” and in “The Preface to the Japanese Edition of Thoughts in Solitude,” written soon after this period.
Merton had finally accomplished his goals within the monastic structure without breaking his vow of obedience, but somehow he was not happy. He had been a monk for nearly a quarter of a century; he was a well-known and respected writer; he had “returned” to the world in his writings with renewed perspective and compassion. Yet doubts and uncertainties lingered. We encounter a Merton whose moods fluctuate, a man who is not always in a good mood. Is he a good monk? Is he using his solitude properly? Is he writing too much and is he writing the wrong kind of thing? Is his social commentary inappropriate and ill-advised? The journal does not depict a man who has come to rest, a man who is settled in his self-conceived and longed-for hermit role. He is still “dancing,” performing, in one of his phrases, “mental gavottes”–trying to find his real Auftrag, or purpose, but finding it difficult to know what that is. Along the way, he expresses no little impatience and exasperation–with himself, of course, but also with others.
The hermitage is not the panacea he had imagined it would be during all the years he badgered Dom James about being a hermit. Lack of facilities inconvenience the urbane Merton at first, though he does question the extent to which a “hermit” should luxuriate in conveniences provided by modern technology. While this particular “hermit” may glory in the woods, he has little conception of “roughing it.” He cannot see to read (extremely important to him); he has to carry water from the monastery; he has to go to an outhouse where snakes may lurk. He is grateful when Dom James starts improvements at the hermitage–wiring it for electricity; investigating the digging of a well; planning the addition of a bathroom and chapel. Yet, even as some improvements are being made and others planned, Merton, who suffered as much as any human from the “grass is greener” syndrome, has dreams about moving to a new location–Edelin’s Hollow–which Dom James is thinking of accepting as a gift and where, he suggests to Merton, he might consider building more hermitages. So, Merton “dances” off to Edelin’s Hollow and, while ostensibly scouting for Dom James, envisions sites where he might have a different hermitage and where, he implies, he might experience “better” solitude. One site that intrigues him is near an old, ruined dance hall where the people from the hollows roundabout had once come “to drink and raise hell” (January 6, 1965). As the Edelin’s Hollow project falters, Merton turns to his life in the existing hermitage and by December 1965 settles into a reasonable, if still uneasy, acceptance of his life there and its meaning for him.
One “gavotte” that nags him is the recurring feeling of “growing old.” Cert
ainly we in the 1990s no longer consider fifty old, and I tend to doubt that people did in the 1960s–at least not in the sense that Merton means–so why does he have this consistent thought? One conclusion could be that the members of his immediate family were all dead and had died at early ages: his father at forty-four, mother at thirty-four, and only brother at twenty-five. But his American grandparents had lived into their seventies and, with the exception of his father, the genes of his New Zealand family produced extraordinary longevity–his grandmother and one aunt both lived to 101 and two other aunts lived into their nineties. If he were to live that long, at this point he would have lived only about half his life!
It was true that Gethsemani had probably seemed more youthfully vital in Merton’s earlier years, particularly when young men flocked to the monastery after World War II. It is equally true that, as observers have noted, during and after the Second Vatican Council Gethsemani became an “aging community” (and he certainly does fear that the monastic life as he has known it may disappear in the wake of the council). Yet Merton was not among the oldest monks. The feeling of growing old, with attendant musings on death, stems, I think, from a different cause. During these two and a half years Thomas Merton simply did not feel good most of the time. During much of it he was in pain or extreme discomfort. Like all of us he saw his body deteriorating and he did not like it. In December 1965, a relative sent him a snapshot taken in 1937 and it reminds him of a different time and a different body–“a body totally assured of itself and without care, perfectly relaxed, ready for enjoyment.” He wishes he could have that twenty-two-year-old rugby player’s body back and “could start over again.” But he quickly adds, “How absurd.” This wish does launch him into a rare catalogue of his ailments, which lets us glimpse what a difficult period this must have been for him and why he so often grows peevish and feels old.
Dancing in the Water of Life Page 1
