The Waters of Siloe

by Thomas Merton

  The movies and popular literature have always presented the American pioneer as at least implicitly God-fearing. But it seems that in Kentucky, at the turn of the nineteenth century, barely one man in twelve claimed any interest in religion. However, a reaction was bound to come. And it came with the impact of an explosion. The year 1800 saw the beginning of that “Great Awakening” which swept most of the frontier States like wildfire, and it is not strange that the first of all camp meetings was held in Kentucky. The emotional and sociable pioneers, who would ride four days on horseback to go to a dance, and who loved nothing better than huge, wild parties, fell for the religious revival in droves. The idea caught on, and all the sects took it up. There followed a series of orgies that attracted and united men of every shade of Protestant belief, destroying all distinction between them in a spiritual intoxication which imparted a somewhat terrifying character to the camp meetings of those years.

  The wildest of all these sects was one called the Philistines. Their gatherings quickly developed into tempests of queer “exercises” under the influence of a spirit who was evidently less holy than the cultists believed.

  There was, of course, plenty of dancing and shouting and screaming. Convulsions and weird, ecstatic “experiences” were quite common, especially among the women. There was a certain Rev. McNamara who would come crawling through the crowd on his belly, crying, “I am the old serpent who tempted Eve.” Groups of ministers were seen playing marbles, as a practical application of the text: “Unless you become as little children you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

  The favorite and most appalling of the “exercises” was barking. Scores of the cultists gathered around a tree and barked like dogs. What were they barking at? They answered that they had “treed the Savior”—or else that they had “treed the devil.” It did not seem to make much difference which one they had treed. The barking was what really mattered. When they really warmed up to this devotion, they would seize the trees with both arms and beat their heads against the trunks until blood ran down into their eyes. When the noise was over and they came to themselves and staggered home again with their bandaged heads, the revivalists settled again into their old ruts and their old differences and filled the air with interminable arguments about points of doctrine.

  In the middle of all this was one sect—besides Father Badin’s Catholics, of course—which had nothing to do with barking and convulsions and refused even to get into an argument about theology. These were the Shakers, who settled in Kentucky in the same year as the first Trappists. The Shakers had been brought to America by a certain Ann Lee, a former Quaker, expelled by the Friends because she had some strange ideas. One of her beliefs was that there had to be masculine and feminine principles in the Deity. Word later got around among the Shakers that “Mother Ann” herself was the feminine principle. In spite of their peculiar theology, the Shakers were much safer people to have for neighbors than the Philistines. They were quiet, sober, hard-working men and women who segregated themselves into communistic villages of their own where they lived in celibacy, practiced their religion, and supported themselves by farming and various crafts. In spite of the note of derision in the nickname they received, the Shakers did not go in for violent ceremonies. They did a little sober dancing and hand clapping—the men and women dancing as they lived, in separate groups. Eventually the Kentucky Shakers, who took celibacy seriously, all died out. The plain, solid brick buildings of their old village now remain as a curiosity for sight-seers.1

  When Father Theodore Badin looked about him at the religious climate of the State where Providence had led him to settle, he had good reason to be anxious about the spiritual welfare of the Catholics under his charge. If he could do something to cultivate their reason, he knew it would prove valuable to them in preserving their faith: so, the one thing he needed most of all was a school. However, the intellect and will of man are supernaturally helpless without grace. If it were possible to have such a thing as a monastery from which the penances and prayers and contemplation of the monks would radiate the clean influence of Divine wisdom and charity, then the Catholics would be truly protected against the diabolical mysticisms of the Philistines and their associates. Thus, when Father Badin heard that the Trappists would come to Kentucky and serve both as contemplatives and as teachers, his cup of joy was full.

  In July, 1805, Dom Urban’s Trappists were once again on the road with their covered wagon, traveling in the same style that had taken them from one end of Europe to the other a few years before. Now they were crossing Pennsylvania in easy stages, keeping the Val Sainte Rule as they went. They rose in the middle of the night to chant the office, ate at the regular times, worked, prayed, and so on. More often than not they slept under the stars or spread their sleeping bags on the ground under the soughing branches of the Appalachian mountain forests.

  It is easy to imagine the thoughts of those silent men in their long days of traveling. It was hard, but their hearts were filled with peace—peace in the assurance that this vast, quiet land not only was made for them but needed them. It was made for contemplatives. It needed their voices, their clean hearts on fire with the secret love of God, to complete its own inarticulate and unconscious praise of the Creator, Whose love was mirrored in the perfection of everything that grew or existed under the wide arch of that blue summer sky. God spoke to them in the rugged ossature of the wooded mountains and in the delicate design and frail structure of the hundred kinds of wildflowers that they had never before seen. God sang to them in the whistling of brightly colored birds—cardinals, orioles, names they could not know—and in the clear voices of the mountain streams. The cool breath of the woods and the mossy rocks and the pine trees was, as it were, the breath of God, sweet as the unction of the Spirit Who breathed within them, the pledge of their union with the God of heaven.

  When they reached the Monongahela River, their journey became more hazardous. Dom Urban bought a couple of flatboats for twelve dollars. Someone remarked that that was about all they were worth.

  The waters were low, and the river was so dangerous at that season that Dom Urban could hardly find a pilot who would risk the journey to Pittsburgh. Eight or ten times a day the boats ran aground and everybody had to jump into the water and push them off the sand bars. They covered barely fifteen miles a day.

  However, when they reached Pittsburgh in a burst of relieved self-confidence at the thought that the big Ohio River would be simple to navigate, Dom Urban paid off his pilot and bought two bigger flatboats, appointed three lay brothers as navigators, picked up what information he could along the Pittsburgh waterfront, and supplemented it all with the purchase of a popular almanac full of information about natural phenomena.

  So, the Trappists pushed off into the powerful and swift-moving waters of the Ohio under circumstances that would have made an experienced riverman quake with fear.

  One of the flatboats sprang a leak in midstream, and the monks barely got to shore before it foundered on the sand. The abbey of Bellefontaine still possesses some big folio psalters and antiphonaries that bear the traces of this shipwreck on the Ohio River.

  The Trappists had no money, and at Cincinnati they had to sell one of the flatboats in order to buy food. They prepared to continue on their way, perilously crowded, on the other boat: monks, brothers, oblates, horses, and baggage. As soon as they left the shore it was evident that the boat would sink under them. They put in again at once, and the horses went on by land with two brothers.

  But the journey was too much for the animals. Most of them died before they ever got to Louisville. The brothers were lucky to reach there alive themselves. As for those on the boat, they floated downstream under the burning sun, starving on the same rations they had enjoyed on board the “Sally.”

  When they reached their destination in Kentucky, practically the whole community collapsed from undernourishment and exhaustion. It was a miracle that they got to Louisville at all. Only one day�
��s journey from the town they had nearly capsized in the middle of the river.

  Of course, they were surrounded by all the solicitude of warmhearted Kentucky hospitality. The Catholics of the town came to meet them with wagons to carry their baggage and offered them all the foods and provisions they had so long needed: corn, flour, vegetables, melons, potatoes, apples. For a few days they were able to get some of the nourishment that the Rule allowed them in the summer season. But it was already September, and the monastic fasts began. For La Val Sainte that meant that even watermelons were forbidden.

  For a month the stricken community languished in a condition that gave the doctors great anxiety. Dom Urban got no sleep for thirty days and was practically unable to keep anything on his stomach. Father Badin took some of the worst cases into his own house. Three of Dom Urban’s four priests died. They included the cantor and the second superior. One of them, Father Dominic, was an ex-Carthusian. The bodies of Fathers Dominic, Basil, and Robert still lie in the Holy Cross churchyard at the foot of Rohan’s Knob.

  However, as autumn progressed, the monks and oblates got back on their feet. A school was opened on Pottinger’s Creek, and December, 1805, found Dom Urban, to the consternation of Father Badin, back in Baltimore, where he was trying to raise money to buy a farm. While the brothers were working in the fields and the oblates were in school and the monks were at their various tasks (which included teaching), Dom Urban was almost always on the road.

  He finally discovered what seemed to be a good site for a monastery on Casey Creek, some thirty miles south of Holy Cross. He bought eight hundred acres of land from the government and, encouraged by the arrival of reinforcements-Father Joseph Dunand and four Trappists arrived at Pottinger’s Creek with a Canadian secular priest as postulant in 1806—set about making a foundation on that property.

  It was a wild place. The woods still were full of bears and wolves, and a perhaps exaggerated account says that the monks killed eight hundred rattlesnakes there in two summers. Nevertheless, they went to work as only Trappists can work. Several streams flowed together in fields of rich alluvial soil. Soon the monks had a sawmill going on one of the streams and had built themselves a log-cabin monastery and a small chapel for their Catholic neighbors. Also, of course, there was the inevitable school. Sixty acres of land were cleared and grain and corn were sowed and the fields were soon waving with green banners of maize.

  The monks set up a watchmaking shop that was the best in that part of Kentucky, and people came from all the region around Bardstown to buy clocks or have them repaired. This alone was enough to keep the community from starving. Dom Urban, meanwhile, had written to France appealing for books. His brother had combed the second-hand bookstores of Nantes to build up a monastic library for the Kentucky Trappists.

  What was more important, novices began to arrive. Soon there were two—one Irish and another American—with the prospect of five more priests who wanted to come down from Canada to join the monks.

  The monks nearly made a distinguished conquest in Father Charles Nerinckx, who felt a strong attraction to their austere life of silence and labor and contemplation. But that would have been a hard blow for the new diocese of Bardstown, which was formed in 1808.

  This energetic priest frequently stayed with the Trappists when he came to those parts on visits to his missions of St. Mary’s and St. Bernard’s. He was able to observe their life at very close range, since he and his guide slept in the log cabin which was at the same time dormitory, refectory, scriptorium, chapter room, and church for the pioneer community of Cistercians.

  He saw how the monks took their five or six hours’ nightly sleep on the bare ground, with sacks of straw for pillows. He woke with them at one o’clock and joined in the chanting of Matins and Lauds, and he saw them go out to work in the woods and fields when the sun was coming up and the grass was still silver with frost or dew, according to the season. He saw how they never broke their fast before noon, even in the summer, when they were reputedly not fasting. And he was able to share with them their rude and simple menu of vegetables and black bread.

  And Father Nerinckx came away from that silent and peaceful retreat with his heart full of the happiness that breathed in the very atmosphere of the place. Small wonder that he wanted to join them. In fact, he wrote to Bishop Carroll about it, but could not get permission.

  Among his letters we still read his impressions of the new monastery at Casey Creek: “Happy men who can find an attraction in tribulation, joy in suffering, abundance in poverty, in spite of the contempt heaped upon them by a false and delusive world. What modest and holy joy is in their faces! And how their silence speaks to one! . . . Vere haec est generatio quaerentium Dominant.” 2

  If the priests in Kentucky were edified at the Trappists, the Catholics in general were in awe at the holiness of the monks and their own good fortune in having them there. What a contrast it was, when you turned from the “Philistines” barking in the woods to these quiet and peaceful and self-contained and modest men, full of the simplicity and charity of the first Christians. And what a privilege it was to hear the solemn, moving tones of the ancient liturgical chant of the Church rising up in the night to high heaven from these Kentucky woods, where nothing had been heard for centuries but the frogs of Casey Creek and the screech owls and whippoorwills.

  Some twenty boys from Catholic families around Kentucky were already at the monks’ new school, and now the whole community, including monks, brothers, and oblates, numbered forty-five souls. The boys, of course, were lodged and educated free. They did not provide the monastery with any income, but they joined in to some extent with the farm work and earned at least part of their board.

  Dom Urban still had to depend on benefactors to pay off his debt on the property. For that reason he once again took the road to Baltimore, where two rich ladies had promised him two thousand dollars. But when he arrived, he discovered that false news of his death had been spread in the city, and the disconsolate ladies had given their money to somebody else.

  In Kentucky the streams that watered the bottoms where the monks had planted their wheat and corn and vegetables overflowed in the late summer and carried everything away, sparing only the monastery itself. Later, the monastery burned down. The monks lost most of their library in the fire but saved their choir books and watchmaking equipment.

  That was in December, 1808.

  However, in March of that year, in spite of the unpaid debt on the land at Casey Creek, the restless Dom Urban and his prior, Father Joseph Dunand, had already been planning to move West to what was still called Louisiana. Dissatisfied for some reason with Kentucky, they were investigating offers that had been made them in Missouri and Illinois.

  When Father Badin asked for an explanation as to why they wanted to leave Kentucky before their monastery had had a chance to get itself established, their answer was that they could not continue to teach school in Kentucky, since they did not know English. Sometimes it is suggested that the fire was the work of an incendiary and that the monks left Kentucky as victims of anti-Catholic persecution. But there are no grounds for the persecution story, and in any case Dom Urban was already planning, several months before the fire, to leave.

  And so, to the despair of Father Badin and Father Nerinckx, who were by now thoroughly disconcerted by Dom Urban’s restless changes of scene, the Trappists began to build their own flatboats on the banks of the Salt River, so that, when the waters rose in the spring of 1809, they would be able to float down to the Ohio.

  There does not seem to be much doubt that Dom Urban was making the biggest of all his mistakes. The Trappists had many friends in Kentucky, and even if they had not already received a fair promise of success at Casey Creek, a Mr. Stoddard at Nolin Creek was willing to give them two thousand acres of land for nothing. They belonged in Kentucky.

  It seems that the real answer is to be found in the active and missionary spirit that animated both Dom Urban and his prior, Fat
her Joseph. They wanted to be evangelizing the Indians. The prospect of life on what was then the northwest frontier was much more exciting than were the seven Catholic families who frequented the little mission of St. Bernard’s at Casey Creek.

  The evil reputation of the settlement called St. Louis reacted on the excitable Father Joseph like the smell of powder on an old war horse. The Jesuit missionaries, who had first brought Christianity to that region, had disappeared when their order was suppressed, and the land was without priests. Life on the frontier was wild and uncouth, and when Father Joseph learned that a man in St. Louis had traded his wife to somebody for a bottle of whiskey, he felt in his bones that this was where God was calling him to preach the Gospel.

  Father Joseph Dunand was an impetuous man. The story goes that he had been an officer in the French army of the Revolution and had been ordered to take a captive priest out and shoot him. Instead, he had given the man his liberty and then fled for his own life, ending up as a monk at La Val Sainte.

  Now, in St. Louis, he showed the same dramatic generosity. One day he happened to pass the jail. Someone told him that a prisoner was about to be executed. He rushed into the building at once and found seven men gathered together in a cell. Six were Protestant ministers and one was the criminal. Father Joseph immediately singled out the wildest in the group, a man with an unkempt beard and a strange glitter in his eyes, dressed in a tattered coat, and began to harangue him on the necessity of preparing for the next life by Baptism.

  The man did not seem to appreciate his sermon, and when Father Joseph asked him if he was a Catholic, he replied that he was an Anabaptist minister. The scene developed into a general free-for-all, four hours of incoherent debate which Anally ended in the Baptism of the prisoner as a Catholic and the triumph of the Trappist missionary.