The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition

by Thomas Merton

  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.

  In any case, that day Father Abbot turned to us with just as much ease and facility as if he had nothing else whatever to do but to give the first words of advice to two postulants leaving the world to become Trappists.

  “Each one of you,” he said, “will make the community either better or worse. Everything you do will have an influence upon others. It can be a good influence or a bad one. It all depends on you. Our Lord will never refuse you grace...”

  I forget whether he quoted Father Faber. Reverend Father likes to quote Father Faber, and after all it would be extraordinary if he failed to do so on that day. But I have forgotten.

  We kissed his ring as he blessed us both, and went out again. His parting shaft had been that we should be joyful but not dissipated, and that the Names of Jesus and Mary should always be on our lips.

  At the other end of the long dark hall we went into a room where three monks were sitting at typewriters, and we handed over our fountain pens and wristwatches and our loose cash to the Treasurer, and signed documents promising that if we left the monastery we would not sue the monks for back wages for our hours of manual labor.

  And then we passed through the door into the cloister.

  Now I began to see the part of the monastery I had never seen—the long wing beyond the cloister, in the back of the building, where the monks actually live, where they gather in the intervals.

  It was a contrast to the wide-open, frigid formality of the cloister itself. To begin with, it was warmer. There were notice boards on the walls, and there was a warm smell of bread coming from the bakery which was somewhere in those parts. Monks moved about with their cowls over their a
rms, waiting to put them on when the bell rang for the end of work. We stopped in the tailor shop and were measured for our robes, and then passed through the door to the novitiate.

  Father Master showed us where the novitiate chapel was, and we knelt a moment before the Blessed Sacrament in that plain, whitewashed room. I noticed a statue of my friend St. Joan of Arc on one side of the door, and on the other was, of course, the Little Flower.

  Then we went down to the basement where all the novices were milling around in the clatter of washbasins, groping for towels with their eyes full of soap and water.

  Father Master picked the one who seemed to be the most badly blinded by suds and I heard him tell him to take care of me when we got to church.

  “That’s your guardian angel,” Father explained, and added: “Fie used to be a Marine.”

  III

  LITURGICALLY SPEAKING, YOU COULD HARDLY FIND A BETTER time to become a monk than Advent. You begin a new life, you enter into a new world at the beginning of a new liturgical year. And everything that the Church gives you to sing, every prayer that you say in and with Christ in His Mystical Body is a cry of ardent desire for grace, for help, for the coming of the Messiah, the Redeemer.

  The soul of the monk is a Bethlehem where Christ comes to be born—in the sense that Christ is born where His likeness is re-formed by grace, and where His Divinity lives, in a special manner, with His Father and His Holy Spirit, by charity, in this “new incarnation,” this “other Christ.”

  The Advent Liturgy prepares that Bethlehem with songs and canticles of ardent desire.

  It is a desire all the more powerful, in the spiritual order, because the world around you is dead. Life has ebbed to its dregs. The trees are stripped bare. The birds forget to sing. The grass is brown and grey. You go out to the fields with mattocks to dig up the briars. The sun gives its light, as it were, in faint intermittent explosions, “squibs,” not rays, according to John Donne’s conceit in his Nocturnal on St. Lucy’s Day....

  But the cold stones of the Abbey church ring with a chant that glows with living flame, with clean, profound desire. It is an austere warmth, the warmth of Gregorian chant. It is deep beyond ordinary emotion, and that is one reason why you never get tired of it. It never wears you out by making a lot of cheap demands on your sensibilities. Instead of drawing you out into the open field of feelings where your enemies, the devil and your own imagination and the inherent vulgarity of your own corrupted nature can get at you with their blades and cut you to pieces, it draws you within, where you are lulled in peace and recollection and where you find God.

  You rest in Him, and He heals you with His secret wisdom.

  That first evening in choir I tried to sing my first few notes of Gregorian chant with the worst cold I had ever had in my life—the fruit of my experiment in preparing myself for the low temperature of the monastery before I was even inside the place.

  It was the second vespers of St. Lucy and we chanted the psalms of the Commune virginum, but after that the capitulum was of the second Sunday of Advent, and presently the cantor intoned the lovely Advent hymn, Conditor Alme Siderum.

  What measure and balance and strength there is in the simplicity of that hymn! Its structure is mighty with a perfection that despises the effects of the most grandiloquent secular music—and says more than Bach without even exhausting the whole range of one octave. That evening I saw how the measured tone took the old words of St. Ambrose and infused into them even more strength and suppleness and conviction and meaning than they already had and made them dower before God in beauty and in tire, flower along the stones and vanish in the darkness of the vaulted ceiling. And their echo died and left our souls full of peace and grace.

  When we began to chant the Magnificat I almost wept, but that was because I was new in the monastery. And in fact it was precisely because of that that I had reason to weep with thanksgiving and happiness as I croaked the words in my dry, hoarse throat, in gratitude for my vocation, in gratitude that I was really there at last, really in the monastery, and chanting God’s liturgy with His monks.

  Every day, from now on, the office would ring with the deep impassioned cries of the old prophets calling out to God to send the Redeemer. Veni, Dominie, noli tardare: relaxa facinora plebis tuae. And the monks took up the cry with the same strong voices, and armed with the confidence of grace and God’s own presence within them, they argued with Him and chided Him as His old prophets had done before. What is the matter with You, Domine? Where is our Redeemer? Where is the Christ You have promised us? Are You sleeping? Have You forgotten us, that we should still be buried in our miseries and in the shadow of war and sorrow?

  Yet if I had been stirred with a movement of feeling during that first evening in choir, I had little opportunity in those first days to enjoy what are commonly called “consolations.” Consolations cannot get a good hold on you when you are half stupefied with the kind of cold I had. And then there was all the business of getting used to the thousand material details of monastic life.

  Now I saw the monastery from within, from the church floor, so to speak, not from the visitor’s gallery. I saw it from the novitiate wing, not from the shiny and well-heated Guest House. Now I was face to face with monks that belonged not to some dream, not to some medieval novel, but to cold and inescapable reality. The community which I had seen functioning as a unity, in all the power of that impressive and formal liturgical anonymity which clothes a body of men obscurely in the very personality of Christ Himself, now appeared to me broken up into its constituent parts, and all the details, good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant, were there for me to observe at close range.

  By this time God had given me enough sense to realize at least obscurely that this is one of the most important aspects of any religious vocation: the first and most elementary test of one’s call to the religious life—whether as a Jesuit, Franciscan, Cistercian, or Carthusian—is the willingness to accept life in a community in which everybody is more or less imperfect.

  The imperfections are much smaller and more trivial than the defects and vices of people outside in the world: and yet somehow you tend to notice them more and feel them more, because they get to be so greatly magnified by the responsibilities and ideals of the religious state, through which you cannot help looking at them.

  People even lose their vocations because they find out that a man can spend forty or fifty or sixty years in a monastery and still have a bad temper. Anyway, now that I was a part of Gethsemani I looked about me to see what it was really like.

  I was in a building with huge thick walls, some painted green, some white and most of them with edifying signs and sentiments painted on them. “If any man think himself to be a religious, not bridling his tongue, that man’s religion is vain.” And so on. I never quite discovered the value of those signs, because for my own part as soon as I had read them once I never noticed them again. They are there before me all the time but they simply don’t register on my mind. However, perhaps some people are still pondering on them after years in the house. In any case it is a Trappist custom. You find it practically everywhere in the Order.

  What was important was not the thick, unheated walls, but the things that went on within them.

  The house was full of people, men hidden in white cowls and brown capes, some with beards, the lay brothers, others with no beards but monastic crowns. There were young men and old men, and the old ones were in the minority. At a rough guess, with all the novices we have in the house now I think the average age of the community cannot be much over thirty.

  There was, I could see, something of a difference between the community proper and the novices. The monks and the professed brothers were more deeply absorbed in things that the novices had not yet discovered. And yet looking around at the novices there was a greater outward appearance of piety in them—but you could sense that it was nearer the surface.

  It can be said, as a general rule, that the greatest saints are se
ldom the ones whose piety is most evident in their expression when they are kneeling at prayer, and the holiest men in a monastery are almost never the ones who get that exalted look, on feast days, in the choir. The people who gaze up at Our Lady’s statue with glistening eyes are very often the ones with the worst tempers.

  With the novices, their sensible piety was innocent and spontaneous, and it was perfectly proper to their state. As a matter of fact I liked the novitiate at once. It was pervaded with enthusiasm and vitality and good humor.

  I liked the way they kidded one another in sign language, and I liked the quiet storms of amusement that suddenly blew up from nowhere and rocked the whole “scriptorium” from time to time. Practically all the novices seemed to be very enlightened and sincere about their duties in the religious life; they had been quick in catching on to the rules and were keeping them with spontaneous ease rather than hair-splitting exactitude. And the ingenuous good humor that welled up from time to time in the middle of all this made their faces all shine like the faces of children—even though some of them were no longer young.

  You felt that the best of them were the simplest, the most unassuming, the ones who fell in with the common norm without fuss and without any special display. They attracted no attention to themselves, they just did what they were told. But they were always the happiest ones, the most at peace.

  They stood at the mean between two extremes. On one hand there were one or two who exaggerated everything they did and tried to carry out every rule with scrupulousness that was a travesty of the real thing. They were the ones who seemed to be trying to make themselves saints by sheer effort and concentration—as if all the work depended on them, and not even God could help them. But then there were also the ones who did little or nothing to sanctify themselves, as if none of the work depended on them—as if God would come along one day and put a halo on their heads and it would all be over. They followed the others and kept the Rule after a fashion, but as soon as they thought they were sick they started pleading for all the mitigations that they did not already have. And the rest of the time, they fluctuated between a gaiety that was noisy and disquieting, and a sullen exasperation that threw a wet blanket over the whole novitiate.