The Waters of Siloe

by Thomas Merton

  But the crowd of young faces, the enthusiasm and joy of so many energetic young monks in the first fervor of the monastic life, gave the abbey of Gethsemani an atmosphere of vitality and happiness which it had not known in all its ninety-five years. Visitors were deeply affected by the current of joy that rioted through the veins of this great community—and by the contrast with the gloom of the world outside. Novices who weakened and forgot, for a moment, the strength of their resolutions and resumed their secular clothes to return to the world, soon regretted their decision, entered other monasteries or seminaries, or ran back, with all possible speed, to Gethsemani.

  When he saw all this and recognized that it was not enough merely to enlarge the buildings and make room for crowds of postulants, Dom Frederic Dunne found himself close to the fruition of an ideal that was once thought impossible to realize. The time had at last come for the American Trappists to spread and build monasteries of their own and extend the power of their hidden apostolate all over the plains and mountains and valleys of the New World.

  The war in Europe seemed an insuperable obstacle. Before you can make a foundation, you have to go to Rome and to the General Chapter at Cîteaux. Communication with Rome was impossible. There had not been any General Chapters since 1938. What was worse, the Abbot General, Dom Hermann-Joseph Smets, had died in the first days of 1943.

  But the situation was desperate. Gethsemani had either to make a foundation or burst. Dom Frederic had never been able to tolerate the thought of refusing admission to a postulant on the grounds that there was not enough room. He would have gone on admitting them until they were sleeping four abreast on the floor of the chapter room and chanting the office in relays.

  Meanwhile, many bishops were trying to persuade the Trappists to come to their dioceses. There was plenty of choice. The monks could have picked almost any climate, any environment.

  Dom Frederic, who did all the planning and all the deciding, chose the site for the new foundation on principles that were typical of his whole life.

  The Bishop of Savannah-Atlanta, Monsignor Gerald P. O’Hara, was urging the monks to come to Georgia. The climate in Georgia is not any too wonderful for people who have to sleep fully clothed in a religious habit and put in a hard day’s work in the fields and chant for six hours in choir even in the middle of summer. Then, too, it was questionable whether the population of rigid Protestants, liberally interspersed with members of the Ku Klux Klan and other such societies, would receive a community of Trappists with unmixed enthusiasm. But Bishop O’Hara was an old friend of Gethsemani, and Dom Frederic had once lived in Atlanta. Besides, he thought of all the strange ideas that the people of Georgia probably had about Catholics and Trappists. . . .

  In short, Georgia seemed to him to be the logical place to go. He received the enthusiastic support of his community, who voted for the plan and settled down to see what would happen.

  Permission to go ahead was granted by the Apostolic Delegate in Washington.

  Dom Frederic made a couple of journeys south and returned to give the monks in chapter an idea of what he had seen. He had been north and south of Atlanta. He had seen a plantation in some hills, which was too big; another one somewhere else that was too small, and another one thirty miles or so from Atlanta which looked all right: it had woods and was watered by a big creek. It was called Honey Creek Plantation. That was the one that was finally bought.

  After that, there was not much discussion of the new foundation. Things just quietly developed. Those who happened to be working around the south wing of the abbey noticed that Father James was collecting many boxes and bales, packing them with tools and commodities, and storing them up in the vault where the archives and rare books are kept. Of course, there were one or two experts in the monastery who had decided that they knew who was going to be sent to Georgia, and they communicated the information to one another by sign language, with the help of the abbey laundry list.

  However, all surmise was finally set at rest on the feast of St. Joseph, March 19, 1944. The monks assembled in chapter after the matutinal Mass to be addressed by Dom Frederic, who had made one last trip to Georgia. They all knew that he had been giving the new farm a final inspection, and some of them knew that he had taken a New Haven builder, a good friend of the abbey, to Georgia and had left him with instructions to clear out the hayloft of a big brick barn and try to make it habitable for some twenty Trappist monks and brothers.

  And so, that morning, while the pale spring dawn began to light up the frosted windows of the chapter room, the monks listened with amused excitement while their abbot read off a list of twenty names—beginning with a hale old German priest who was just about to celebrate his fortieth anniversary as a Trappist in Gethsemani, and going on down the line to a lay brother who had made his simple profession a month or so before.

  It was not until it was all over that the monks realized how fond they had become of one another and of Gethsemani in the years that had passed! The departure was set for two days later, the Feast of St. Benedict—for on that day Cîteaux had been founded nearly eight hundred and fifty years before.

  Atlanta woke up to a strange invasion. Twenty men with shaven heads and monastic crowns, in black and white habits, piled out of a railway car, trussed up the skirts of their robes with strings, and were flinging boxes and crates onto the platform and loading them into trucks. They had been up since three that morning, when they rose and recited all their office for the day, and they were too tired and too busy to pay much attention to the crowd or to the flashbulbs of the news cameramen.

  By the time the monks had all their baggage loaded and were themselves settled in the cars of priests who had collected from every part of the diocese to help them, it began to rain. And so they started on the last leg of their journey—the thirty miles that remained between the city and their new home, near Conyers, in Rockdale County.

  They arrived about one o’clock in the afternoon. They stepped down into the mud of a big barnyard and looked about them at their new home. They were in gray, undulating country, among fields that would be full of cotton when summer came. Over on the crest of a slight rise was the edge of a pine wood. In the other direction, they could see a share cropper’s cabin. But right before them was their own home. The big white barn, with a cluster of sheds around it, threatened to compete with the share cropper’s cabin, as far as discomfort was concerned.

  But there was no room for dismay in their hearts. Most of them felt a thrill of satisfaction and gratitude that they were at last able to live a life that was unequivocally poor and painful, harder and rougher than that of the poorest Negro or the most destitute share cropper in the countryside. It was almost impossible that they should not compare their state with that of the Christ Who was born poor and friendless in a stable and Whose cradle was the feed trough of pack animals and cattle.

  With the bulbs of the reporters still flashing around them like an electric storm, they set up their altars in the hayloft and said Mass. After they had all said Mass and received Communion, they broke their fast. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. They were right on time, according to the schedule of St. Benedict for the season of Lent.

  The next day the monks were altogether too famous for comfort. Nevertheless, the general impression was that they were welcome. The Atlanta Constitution came out with an editorial praising their hard and prayerful life but adding significantly, “They hope to be unmolested.”

  Rockdale County was taken completely by surprise. There was only one other Catholic family in the vicinity of Conyers, and they happened to be the Trappists’ next-door neighbors. The rest of the Protestant citizenry were filled with mixed emotions at the thought of men dressed up in hoods saying Mass in a barn in their very midst. Who knows what else they might be up to out there! Besides, they had bought the plantation from one of the biggest liquor dealers in Atlanta.

  So it was not long before a committee came to investigate the monks. It was offic
ially appointed by the county grand jury. It inspected the barn and the hayloft chapel and looked at the wallboard dormitory cells and peered at the bearded brother shoemaker and the bearded brother cook and asked Father James, the superior, to explain the rumor that was going around to the effect that some men were being held prisoner in the hayloft. However, the investigators went away and reported that there was “nothing out of the ordinary” going on out at Honey Creek plantation. After that, Conyers began to get used to the idea of having Trappists so near at hand.

  At first a few cautious visitors came to the barn-monastery. Occasionally someone stayed for Mass in the hayloft chapel and listened to the chanting of the monks, punctuated by the more elemental songs of the mules in the stable below. There was something very impressive about the way Gregorian chant and twelfth-century cowls and the Sacrifice that was offered under the species of bread and wine seemed to fit in with the poor, crude surroundings: the bare beams, the rough floor full of cracks, and the smell of hay and animals.

  It was here that the Trappists celebrated their first Easter in Georgia and entered upon a summer that was to provide them with opportunities for penance they had barely dreamed of at Gethsemani, although Kentucky summers are by no means cool.

  The last cold weeks of spring in the Conyers barn had convinced the superior and his colony of men that it would not be wise to face a winter in a building open to all airs and without heat. One of the main tasks that summer would be the building of a temporary monastery. But they also had to make their living. There were wheat and cotton to be harvested, corn to be planted, vegetables to be cultivated, cattle to be cared for, hay to be mown and put under cover. Twenty of them could not do it all in the time the Rule allows for manual labor.

  So, the monks spent the summer working by a timetable that was more like La Val Sainte than Gethsemani or Cîteaux. Even when the big feasts of the summer came along—feasts of sermon, on which Cistercians are entitled to a whole day’s rest and reading and private contemplation (and generally get at least half a day of it)—the men in that barn rose at one o’clock and sang the night office, advanced the hour for Prime and the matutinal Mass, hastened through chapter, and started out for a day’s work before the sun was hot.

  They had bought a sawmill and set it up, and soon it was working overtime. The framework of a quadrangular wooden monastery took shape between a cotton field and a grove of Georgia pine. It is said that trees felled in the morning were going through the mill toward noon and the lumber was nailed in place before nightfall. The whole building would have been finished long before the end of summer if some governmental red tape had not held up work on the chapel. Since the monks were doing all the work themselves and using their own lumber, there was not much trouble about priorities; only the chapel caused a delay. Somehow, there was legislation afoot that believed the chapel might interfere with the war. It was all right for monks to have a monastery: but a chapel . . . there, you had to be cautious! However, the barriers fell in the fall, and the monks made a dash for the lumber that was planed and sawed and piled up near at hand. They put their chapel together and had a complete monastery.

  The interior was finished in time for them to move in on the Vigil of the Immaculate Conception, December 7, 1944. It was just in time. That morning the water had frozen in the cruets while the priests were saying Mass for the last time in the hayloft.

  Meanwhile, the monks had been farming as well as building. In July they had already brought six hundred acres of their farm under cultivation. This included sixty acres of wheat, seventy-five acres of cotton, two hundred and fifty acres of corn, besides their vegetable gardens and the big melon patch, which, although it was right beside the main road, was unmolested the whole summer long.

  All this work had not been done without cost. It was not merely a matter of long hours under a blazing sun that seemed to boil all the life out of them; it was not that the heat left their skin aflame with a virulent red itch that kept them awake when they fell at last upon their straw mattresses at night. Nor was it merely that their muscles ached and their joints and bones protested after so much toil. More important, there was also the subtle and costly sacrifice of the hours of prayer and silence and reading which are so essential to the contemplative life. After all, the real strength of the contemplative is drawn from the union of his mind and will with God, and that union is nourished to a great extent by prayer and meditation and reading. When a monk cannot be alone with his God and rest in His presence, his inner life tends to flag and wither away. He feels the lack of something essential in his spiritual diet. However, all these men knew that there is one thing more fundamental than all the rest: and that is the will of God. And so they were able to offer even this sacrifice of the consolation of silent prayer, along with everything else, and pray to God by their obedience, in the woods and fields and under the hot sun, instead of before the Tabernacle.

  And even then, when they did manage to get a few moments for contemplation, they found that the hayloft chapel was about the hottest corner of the whole farm. Someone even suggested that the monastery ought to have been called “Our Lady of the Frying Pan.”

  All this while, they had scarcely been conscious of the effect they were having on all who came in contact with them. Trappists develop a kind of immunity to the things of the world which insulates them from the thoughts and moods of civil society around them. Most of the time, they are supremely unconscious of the fact that other people are interested in them or in what they are doing.

  But by the time summer was over, they could not help becoming aware that they had made many firm friends. The secret was, of course, the energetic and fervent generosity with which they had thrown away all care for themselves and their own comfort, to accomplish the tasks imposed upon them by necessity. Americans cannot help admiring hard work, especially when it accomplishes a quick, visible result. Here, on the transformed plantation of the Trappists, all these things were very evident. Yet, men felt that these monks were something more than transplanted athletes playing the spiritual equivalent of football in a strange, eleventh-century uniform: from that little pine monastery in Rockdale County there overflowed an intangible but extremely stimulating sense of confidence and happiness and peace. It communicated something of their strength and health and contentment to all those around them who were willing to receive it, and one felt that the monks controlled some secret influence capable of working even on the hearts of those who most opposed them. It was true, of course, they did not win universal sympathy from the whole of the deep South in one summer. The monastery found itself on the mailing lists of several anti-Catholic organizations, and one day, after some visitors had gone through the new chapel, the word “idolatry” was found scrawled in pencil underneath a Crucifix hanging on the wall.

  Nevertheless, Our Lady of the Holy Ghost has prospered from the start. Besides reinforcements that were sent from the mother house, it soon began to receive postulants from many parts of the country. Even before the war ended, applications began to come in from men in the army and navy who felt they wanted to become Trappists when the firing ceased.

  The temporary monastery was only the first in a long series of building projects. New barns, a laundry, a garage, a water tower, and several other farm buildings went up. Meanwhile, since the community had already outgrown its small dormitory, it overflowed into the first floor of the new garage, which became the lay brothers’ sleeping quarters.

  When the first postwar General Chapter of the Order convened at Cîteaux in May, 1946, Dom Frederic flew the Atlantic with a paper in his pocket that asked the fathers to make the Georgia monastery an independent abbey. His petition was granted, and Dom James Fox was elected and duly blessed in October of that year. By that time the community had doubled in size and was still growing. Work on the permanent buildings was already well under way.

  The Georgia foundation had hardly ceased to be news in the Order when it was heard that another foundation had
been made in Great Britain, in spite of the war that was still going on. This time the founders came from one of the great Irish Cistercian abbeys, Mount Saint Joseph, at Roscrea. Dom Camillus Claffey, newly elected abbot, looked across the Irish Sea to Scotland and determined that Cistercian monks would once again chant the praises of God and till the soil of that land that was once filled with Cistercian abbeys. The site he chose was in the Lowlands and not far from the ruins of Melrose. Nunraw Castle was bought, and in 1945 the first Cistercians to enter Scotland as a community since the Reformation landed at Glasgow and made their way to the quiet valley in Haddingtonshire, which was to be their new home.

  The foundation was in many ways a contrast to the one that had been made the year before in Georgia. It was singularly lacking in excitement. Quietly, and without awakening the attention of any news cameras, a small group of men in black suits and Roman collars carried their suitcases into a big, exceedingly solid building, whose thick walls, several centuries old, had been pierced to make windows. They settled themselves in its rooms with no further need to worry about a temporary monastery and started leading the usual life of the Order, thinking, meanwhile, that perhaps, with God’s help, they would be able to build themselves a permanent abbey within ten years or so.

  Foundations can be made that way in Europe: there are many large estates that have become a burden to their owners, who are looking for schools or hospitals or monasteries to take them over. In fact, the same process had been gone through in Ireland some years before, when Mount Melleray, Gethsemani’s elder sister, bought the land on which Mellifont, the first Cistercian abbey in Ireland, had been founded eight hundred years before by men from St. Bernard’s Clairvaux under Blessed Christian O’Conarchy. The monks did not move into the ruins of the old abbey, but they did occupy one of those peculiar pieces of late eighteenth-century classicism which are still to be found in so many corners of the British Isles: heavy, boxlike affairs, pseudo temples, whose porticoes rise amid the sleepy elms and pastures of counties where the chief occupation is fox hunting.