The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition

by Thomas Merton

  It was usually the ones that belonged to these two extremes that left and went back to the world. Those who stayed were generally the normal, good-humored, patient, obedient ones who did nothing exceptional and just followed the common rule.

  On Monday morning I went to confession. It was Ember week, and the novices all went to their extraordinary confessor who was Father Odo that year. I knelt at the little open confessional and confessed with deep contrition that when Father Joachim had told me, one day in the Guest House, to go and tell the Fat Boy from Buffalo to go down to the church for the canonical office of None, I had failed to do so. Having unburdened my soul of this and other similar offences, I got so mixed up at the unfamiliar Cistercian ritual that I was all ready to leave the confessional and run away as soon as Father Odo had finished the first prayer and before he had given me any absolution.

  In fact I was already on my feet and about to walk away when he started talking to me so I thought I had better stay.

  I listened to the things he had to say. He spoke very kindly and simply. And the burden of it was this:

  “Who knows how many souls are depending on your perseverance in this monastery? Perhaps God has ordained that there are many in the world who will only be saved through your fidelity to your vocation. You must remember them if you are ever tempted to leave. And you probably will be tempted to leave. Remember all those souls in the world. You know some of them. Others you may never know until you meet them in heaven. But in any case, you did not come here alone ...”

  All the time I was in the novitiate I had no temptations to leave the monastery. In fact, never since I have entered religion have I ever had the slightest desire to go back to the world. But when I was a novice I was not even bothered by the thought of leaving Gethsemani and going to any other Order. I say I was not bothered by the thought: I had it, but it never disturbed my peace because it was never anything but academic and speculative.

  I remember once how Father Master questioned me on that subject.

  So I admitted: “I have always liked the Carthusians. In fact if I had had a chance I would have entered the Charterhouse rather than coming here. But the war made that impossible....”

  “You wouldn’t get the penance there that we have here,” he said, and then we began to talk of something else.

  That did not become a problem until after profession.

  The next morning Father Master called me in at the end of work and gave me an armful of white woolen garments, telling me to put them on. Postulants used to receive the oblate’s habit a few days after their admission—one of those anomalous customs that grow up in isolated houses. It survived at Gethsemani until one of the recent visitations. And so within three days of my admission to the novitiate I was out of my secular clothing and glad to get rid of it for ever.

  It took me a few minutes to figure out the complications of the fifteenth-century underwear that Trappists wear under their robes, but soon I was out of the cell in a white robe and scapular, and a white cloth band tied around my waist, with the white, shapeless oblate’s cloak around my shoulders. And I presented myself to Father Master to find out my name.

  I had spent hours trying to choose a name for myself when I thought I was going to become a Franciscan—and now I simply took what I got. In fact, I had been too busy to bother with such trivial thoughts. And so it turned out that I was to be called Frater Louis. The Far Boy from Buffalo was Frater Sylvester. I was glad to be Louis rather than Sylvester, although I would probably never have dreamed of choosing either name for myself.

  Still, it would seem that the only reason why God wanted me to remember all my life that I had first sailed for France on the twenty-fifth of August was in order that I should realize at last that it was the Feast of my patron saint in religion. That sailing was a grace. Perhaps ultimately my vocation goes back to the days I spent in France, if it goes back to anything in the natural order.... Besides, I remembered that I used rather frequently to pray at the altar of St. Louis and St. Michael the Archangel in the apse of St. Patrick’s cathedral in New York. I used to light candles to them when I got in trouble in those first days of my conversion.

  I went immediately into the scriptorium and took a piece of paper and printed on it “FRATER MARIA LUDOVICUS” and stuck it on the front of the box that was to represent all the privacy I had left: one small box, in which I would keep a couple of notebooks full of poems and reflections, and a volume of St. John of the Cross and Gilson’s Mystical Theology of St. Bernard, and the letters I would receive from John Paul at his R.A.F. camp in Ontario, and from Mark Van Doren and from Bob Lax.

  I looked out the window at the narrow rocky valley beyond the novitiate parapet, and the cedar trees beyond and the bare woods on the line of jagged hills. Haec requies mea in saeculum saeculi, hic habitabo quoniam elegi eam!

  IV

  IN JANUARY THE NOVICES WERE WORKING IN THE WOODS near the lake which the monks made by throwing a dam across a gulley. The woods were quiet and the axes echoed around the sheet of blue-grey water sleek as metal among the trees.

  You are not supposed to pause and pray when you are at work. American Trappist notions of contemplation do not extend to that: on the contrary you are expected to make some act of pure intention and fling yourself into the business and work up a sweat and get a great deal finished by the time it is all over, lo turn it into contemplation you can occasionally mutter between your teeth: “All for Jesus! All for Jesus!” But the idea is to keep on working.

  That January I was still so new that I had not flung myself into the complex and absurd system of meditation that I afterwards tried to follow out. And occasionally I looked up through the trees to where the spire of the abbey church rose up in the distance, behind a yellow hill skirted with cedars, and with a long blue ridge of hills for background. It was peaceful and satisfying, that scene, and I thought of a line from one of the gradual psalms: Montes in circuitu ejus, et Dominus in circuitu populi sui. Mountains are ’round about it, so the Lord is ’round about His people from henceforth, now and for ever.

  It was true. I was hidden in the secrecy of His protection. He was surrounding me constantly with the work of His love, His wisdom, and His mercy. And so it would be, day after day, year after year. Sometimes I would be preoccupied with problems that seemed to be difficult and seemed to be great, and yet when it was all over the answers that I worked out did not seem to matter much anyway, because all the while, beyond my range of vision and comprehension, God had silently and imperceptibly worked the whole thing out for me, and had presented me with the solution. To say it better, He had worked the solution into the very tissue of my own life and substance and existence by the wise incomprehensible weaving of His Providence.

  I was now preparing for the reception of the habit of novice, which would make me canonically a member of the Order and start me out officially on my progress towards the vows. However, as my papers had not all come, no one knew exactly when I would be clothed in the white cloak. We were still waiting for a letter from the Bishop of Nottingham, whose diocese included Rutland and Oakham, my old school.

  It turned out that I was to have a companion in the reception of the habit—and not the Fat Boy from Buffalo, either. He left the monastery at the beginning of Lent, after having slumbered peacefully through the choral offices for several weeks. He returned home to Buffalo and soon we heard that he was in the Army.

  But no, my companion was to be, you might say, an old friend.

  One day when we had come back from the lake and had taken off our work shoes and washed up, I was hurrying up the stairs from the basement when I ran into Father Master and a postulant coming around the corner.

  The fact that I was hurrying and ran into people only indicates that I was much less of a contemplative than I thought I was.

  In any case, the postulant was a priest, in a Roman collar, and when I took a second look at his face I recognized those bony Irish features and the dark rimmed spectacl
es, the high cheek bones and the ruddy skin. It was the Carmelite with whom I had had all those conversations in the Guest House garden on my retreat, the Easter before, when we had discussed the relative merits of the Cistercians and the Carthusians.

  We both looked at each other with looks that said: “You—here!” I did not actually say the words, but he did. And then he turned to Father Master and said:

  “Father, here is a man who was converted to the faith by reading James Joyce.” I don’t think Father Master had heard of James Joyce. I had told the Carmelite that reading Joyce had contributed something to my conversion.

  So we received the habit together on the first Sunday of Lent. He-received the name of Frater Sacerdos. We stood together in our secular clothes in the middle of the Chapter Room. There was an eighteen-year-old novice with us making simple profession. Behind us was a table stacked with the books that were to be given out to the community as their formal “Lenten reading.”

  Father Abbot was ill. Everybody had become aware of that by the way he had struggled through the Gospel at the night office. He should have been in bed, because, as a matter of fact, he had a bad case of pneumonia.

  However, he was not in bed. He was sitting on that rigid piece of woodwork euphemistically called a “throne,” from which he presides in Chapter. Although he could hardly see us, he delivered an impassioned exhortation, telling us with deep conviction that we were making a big mistake if we came to Gethsemani expecting anything but the cross, sickness, contradictions, troubles, sorrows, humiliations, fasts, sufferings, and, in general, everything that human nature hates.

  Then we went up the steps to his throne one by one and he peeled off our coats (Exuat te Dominus veterem hominem cum actibus suis...) and helped by the cantor and Father Master, formally clothed us in the white robes we had been wearing as oblates, together with the scapulars and cloaks of full-fledged novices in the Order.

  It cannot have been much more than two weeks after that that I was in the infirmary myself, not with pneumonia but with influenza. It was the Feast of St. Gregory the Great. I remember entering the cell assigned to me with a sense of secret joy and triumph, in spite of the fact that it had just been vacated two days before by Brother Hugh, whom we had carried out to the cemetery, lying in his open bier with that grim smile of satisfaction that Trappist corpses have.

  My secret joy at entering the infirmary came from the thought: “Now at last I will have some solitude and I will have plenty of time to pray.” I should have added: “And to do everything that I want to do, without having to run all over the place answering bells.” I was fully convinced that I was going to indulge all the selfish appetites that I did not yet know how to recognize as selfish because they appeared so spiritual in their new disguise. All my bad habits, disinfected, it is true, of formal sin, had sneaked into the monastery with me and had received the religious vesture along with me: spiritual gluttony, spiritual sensuality, spiritual pride....

  I jumped into bed and opened the Bible at the Canticle of Canticles and devoured three chapters, closing my eyes from time to time and waiting, with raffish expectation, for lights, voices, harmonies, savors, unctions, and the music of angelic choirs.

  I did not get much of what I was looking for, and was left with the vague disillusionment of the old days when I had paid down half a dollar for a bad movie....

  On the whole, the infirmary of a Trappist monastery is the worst place to go looking for pleasure. The nearest I came to luxury was in the purely material order, where I got plenty of milk and butter and one day—perhaps the Brother made some kind of a mistake—I even got one sardine. If there had been two or three I would have known it was a mistake, but since there was precisely one, I am inclined to think it was intentional.

  I got up every morning at four and served Mass and received Communion and then the rest of the day I sat up in bed reading and writing. I said the office and went to the Infirmary chapel to do the Stations of the Cross. And in the late afternoon Father Gerard, the infirmarian, made sure that I did not forget to meditate on the volume of Father Faber I had received as a Lenten book.

  But as soon as I began to get better, Father Gerard made me get up and sweep the infirmary and do other odd jobs and when the Feast of St. Joseph came, I was glad to go down to church for the night office and sing a lesson in the Jube.

  It must have been a surprise for all those who thought that I had left the monastery: and when we were back in the infirmary, Father Gerard said: “You sure can sing loud!”

  Finally, on the Feast of St. Benedict, I picked up our blankets and went back to the novitiate, thoroughly satisfied to get off with no more than nine days of what Brother Hugh had called “not Calvary but Thabor.”

  That was the difference between me and Brother Hugh—between one who had just begun his religious life and one who had just finished his with signal success.

  For, to judge by the way people keep mentioning him in sermons, Brother Hugh had been truly a success as a Cistercian. I had not known him, except by sight. And yet even that was enough to tell a great deal about him. I have never forgotten his smile—I don’t mean the one he wore in the bier, but the one he had when he was alive, which was quite a different matter. He was an old Brother, but his smile was full of the ingenuousness of a child. And he had a great abundance of that one indefinite quality which everybody seems willing to agree in calling characteristically Cistercian: the grace of simplicity.

  What that means is often hard to say: but in Brother Hugh and the others like him—and there are not a few—it meant the innocence and liberty of soul that come to those who have thrown away all preoccupation with themselves and their own ideas and judgements and opinions and desires, and are perfectly content to take things as they come to them from the hands of God and through the wishes and commands of their superiors. It meant the freedom of heart that one can only obtain by putting his whole life in the hands of another, with the blind faith that God wills to use our superiors, our directors, as instruments for our guidance and the formation of our souls.

  From what I have heard, Brother Hugh had all that. And therefore he was also what they call a “man of prayer.”

  But this peculiar combination—a contemplative spirit and a complete submission to superiors who entrusted him with many distracting responsibilities around the monastery—sanctified Brother Hugh according to what is, as near as I can make out, the Cistercian formula.

  For it seems to me that our monasteries produce very few pure contemplatives. The life is too active. There is too much movement, too much to do. That is especially true of Gethsemani. It is a powerhouse, and not merely a powerhouse of prayer. In fact, there is an almost exaggerated reverence for work in the souls of some who are here. Doing things, suffering things, thinking things, making tangible and concrete sacrifices for the love of God—that is what contemplation seems to mean here—and I suppose the same attitude is universal in our Order. It goes by the name of “active contemplation.” The word active is well chosen. About the second half of the compound, I am not so sure. It is not without a touch of poetic license.

  It is only in theory that our wills can be disinfected of all these poisons by the universal excuse of “obedience.” Yet it has been the Cistercian formula ever since St. Bernard of Clairvaux and a score of Cistercian Bishops and Abbots in the Middle Ages. Which brings me back to my own life and to the one activity that was born in me and is in my blood: I mean writing.

  I brought all the instincts of a writer with me into the monastery, and I knew that I was bringing them, too. It was not a case of smuggling them in. And Father Master not only approved but encouraged me when I wanted to write poems and reflections and other things that came into my head in the novitiate.

  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 fou
nd 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.