My lens is one of hope, based on six years of research and writing “The Monks of Tibhirine,” the book French director Xavier Beauvois called his “bible” for making his movie about Christian-Muslim friendship. My hope is also based on knowing the back story that goes untold in an otherwise excellent film focusing on the monks’ struggle to be true to their Trappist vows of poverty, charity, and stability when faced with their fear of a brutal death.

Some people today might say that Christian-Muslim love is an oxymoron. Yes, there are Muslims who preach hatred of the Christian West, even though fewer and fewer in the West (outside the US) are practicing or even professing Christians. There are no Muslims I have heard of who preach hatred or even disrespect for Jesus Christ, who is a much revered and sinless prophet in Islam.

There is, however, an active Christian minority that preaches hatred of Islam and regularly insults the Prophet Muhammad. Elements with political agendas on both sides benefit from blackening the other, and the media have been willing accomplices to this downward phobic spiral. “Of Gods and Men” is film that could help right perceptions.

Despite pleas in 1996 from both French and Algerian authorities to leave for a safer place when threatened by Islamic extremists, the monks remained at their remote monastery in Algeria’s Atlas Mountains out of deep sense of commitment to their extended family of villagers who depended on them for moral, medical, and material support. Like their neighbors, the monks trembled with fear at night. They argued among themselves: does the Good Shepherd abandon his flock when the wolves come? Does a mother abandon a sick, infectious child? Does their vow of poverty allow for them to flee to safer ground when their friends cannot?

When seven of the monks were kidnapped, it was not their neighbors who did it. Instead, it was a contract job that employed a group from outside the area to take the monks away from their dangerous situation—to be traded, in effect. But something went wrong along the way. Of one thing I am certain: killing them was not the plan. If that had been the case, they would not have been schlepped around the country for two months nor would negotiations for their release have taken place. Yet for some viewers, I suspect this will be seen as simply another “bad-Muslims-kill–good-Christians” story—exactly what the abbot of the monastery feared when he wrote his last testament, read at the end of the film.

The film works very well dramatically as a struggle between faith and fear. By necessity it leaves out important and broader story components. The tenacious commitment of Abbot Christian de Chergé (played by Lambert Wilson) to serve God in Algeria had been formed in him as a soldier serving in the French army during the Algerian war for independence from 1954 to 1962, when his life was saved by a Muslim friend, an Algerian policeman named Mohammed who faced down local rebels who wanted to shoot Christian one day when they were taking a walk—a time when they would discuss their faith.

That friendship cost the Algerian his life the next day. For Christian, Mohammed’s sacrifice was a gift of love reinforcing his belief that the spirit of Jesus Christ resides in all his children. For the rebels, the friend of my enemy is my enemy.

The film doesn’t have room to tell about the seventy-plus imams who, based on the same logic, were assassinated in the 1990s for denouncing what the terrorists were doing in the name of Islam. The terrorists themselves could show respect for the monks. In a dramatic scene in the film, Saya Attia, head of the terrorist group that intruded upon the monastery on Christmas Eve 1993 with demands for medical help, apologizes to Christian for disturbing their celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. Left out are the leader’s final words to Christian when he extends a hand in friendship: “We don’t consider you foreigners…you are religious.”

Nor does the viewer know that the tiny hamlet of Tibhirine was inhabited by families whose homes in the mountains had been bombed by the French during the war for independence. They had fled to the protection of the monastery, a holy place where the Christian “marabouts” (Arabic for religious teachers) sheltered them until they could build their own homes.

I have one regret about the film. It might have ended on a more positive note for Christian-Muslim relations by showing the genuine remorse of much of the Algerian population. Archbishop Henri Teissier of Algiers received sacks of letters from ordinary Algerians after the monks’ deaths were confirmed. The letters expressed a deep sense of solidarity with the monks as well as a sense of shame that was captured by this one: “No matter what has happened, we truly love you. You are part of us. We have failed in our duty—to protect you, to love you. Forgive us…You must accomplish your divine mission with us. I believe it is God’s plan.”

Universal fraternal love is the essence of Christianity and all true religion. Otherwise, religion degenerates into celestial nationalism. Christian himself frequently said that if religion doesn’t help us to live together, it is worthless.

The idea may seem laughably naïve in a post-9/11 world. Love, however, has nothing to do with sentiment and everything to do with good will, justice, empathy, and respect for others. Like their Savior, the monks’ lives were not taken. They were gifts of love.

John W. Kiser is the author of “The Monks of Tibhirine: Faith, Love, and Terror in Algeria” (St. Martins Press, 2002).

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KATE OLSON, correspondent: On a recent Saturday morning at the First Congregational Church in Berkeley, California, church members and neighbors gathered to hear Brother David talk about living “a spirited life.”

Church group singing: Viva, viva la musica…

OLSON: For Brother David, it is grateful living that makes everything come alive.

BROTHER DAVID STEINDL-RAST, OSB: The practice of gratefulness that I’m concerned with is grateful living. That means every moment of your life you practice gratefulness. You practice awareness that everything is gift, everything is gratuitous, and if it’s all given, gratuitously given, then the only appropriate response is gratefulness What we really want is joy. We don’t want things. We don’t want to accumulate things. We forget that, and so gratefulness can help us see that, can help us realize that.

OLSON: Though Brother David acknowledges there are many things for which we cannot be grateful, he encourages people to be open to the opportunity being given in every situation.

BROTHER DAVID: We cannot be grateful for war. That’s an unmitigated evil. We cannot be grateful for exploitation, for untimely death. But we can be grateful in every situation. The key word is “opportunity.” If you catch onto that, then if we are in practice, when something comes along for which we cannot be grateful, spontaneously we will—our mind will say, “Well, what’s this the opportunity for now?” And there’s always an opportunity for something positive, usually the opportunity to learn something new, even in the worst situations, or for the opportunity to do something. If we learn of an injustice we have the opportunity to stand up and to speak up and to do something.

OLSON: During the day, people reflected on moments of ‘epiphany’ in their lives – what brother David calls mystic or peak experiences, which often include an experience of profound gratitude.

BROTHER DAVID: The mystic is not a special kind of human being, but every human being is a special kind of mystic. We all have mystic experiences, and in these peak moments, in these peak experiences, all of us have this experience of being one with all. Those are the moments in which we feel most alive, most truly ourselves.

OLSON: Grateful living is something you can practice moment by moment in your daily life, he says, and like other spiritual practices, such as Zen meditation, its goal is to live in the present moment, to see everything as “word of God.”

BROTHER DAVID: “Word” is not just vocabulary, but “word” is everything that speaks to us, and in this sense a flower can be a word that speaks to me. A poem as a whole can be a word that speaks to me, a piece of art, everything. It speaks to me. It tells me something, it tells me something about ultimate reality. That’s a mystic insight that every human being can appreciate, I think, and experience, if we only allow ourselves.

OLSON: Cultivating this aliveness in life is central to Brother David’s vocation as a monk and to his message. Born in Austria, he immigrated to the US in 1952 and joined Mount Savior Monastery in Elmira, New York.

Brother David singing: Alleluia …

OLSON: For decades he has lived part of his life as a hermit, in prayer and contemplation and writing books. The other half he travels the globe lecturing and leading retreats, helping people discover this “aliveness” in their own lives. Finding the deeply shared personal experience is at the heart of Brother David’s work in interreligious dialogue.

Brother David speaking at retreat: “…always checking it back with your own experience, always checking it back against your basic faith…”

OLSON: A pioneer in the Christian-Buddhist dialogue, he returns frequently to Tassajara, a Zen monastery in California where he lived for several years. As part of the dialogue with Buddhism, Brother David trained in Zen meditation and joined in Buddhist rituals. He says the task of interreligious dialogue today is to understand the meaning beneath the words of particular creeds or beliefs, to discover the faith that underlies these words that we all share.

BROTHER DAVID: Deep down there is only one faith that all human beings have, and that is that deep trust in life. Even our body expresses that trust in life by always taking another breath. We can’t even stop it. We can’t stop breathing. So that deep trust in life—that is what all humans share, and that expresses itself, then, in a Buddhist way, in a Christian way, and even in ways that we don’t recognize as explicitly religious. Many atheists have a deep faith. They all have that deep faith, but they express it very differently.

OLSON: Beliefs are not faith, he says. Faith is deep trust. And the opposite of faith is not doubt, but fear.

BROTHER DAVID: The one most frequently repeated command in the Bible is not “love your neighbor,” but “fear not.” And if there is one thing that we need in our world, if there’s one thing that we should write on our mirror and see every morning when we look into the mirror, it’s “fear not.” If we went into the day with that command deeply tattooed on our heart, “fear not,” we’d be completely different people and create a completely different world—a world of faith.

OLSON: This deep trust in life is at the heart of what he sees as “the round dance of grateful living.”

BROTHER DAVID: So we participate in this tremendous dance in which the gift comes forth from the source and through thanksgiving returns to the source, where the word comes out of the silence and through understanding returns to the silence. Gratefulness is not just saying “thank you.” It’s acting. It is being your self. A mother is grateful, shows gratefulness by mothering, a scientist by doing science. That is what the Bible calls “in God we live and move and have our being.”

Church group singing: “Viva, viva la musica…”

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Kate Olson reporting from San Francisco.

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JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: The Abbey of St. Benedict, founded in 1857 …

Benedictine monks praying together: “Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit…”

VALENTE: The abbey is located on the campus of Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. Fifty-two monks live here. They lead lives of prayer and contemplation. The abbot is Barnabas Senecal. He has found a spiritual practice in photography.

ABBOT SENECAL: Taking photographs reminds me of the positive. Monastic mindfulness is pursuing what Benedict taught about being aware daily of your presence of God with you and in the world. It’s mindfulness of creation and of sharing that with others.

VALENTE: About 40 of his photographs are now on exhibit at the abbey. His photos include his fellow monks.

ABBOT SENECAL: Those who didn’t know his name call him Father Time. He was an inspiration to us—just a gracious man who also swam every day until he was 100 years old, a man of prayer, a man who came to our communal prayer even when he was 100 years old. We give thanks for a man of such character.

VALENTE: Father James Downey…

ABBOT SENECAL: Late in his life liked to read, liked to sit out on the porch and smoke his pipe. What we save is a memory of a man, a face that’s—he’s very content with life and just a wonderful smile. You know, in Benedictine life we take a vow of stability, and it means that this community is where we live out our life, even where we are buried.

Father Bruce Swift—he loves going down to Lansing to the state penitentiary twice a week, hears confessions, offers Mass for the prisoners. It’s a ministry to him, and he’ll do it until he can’t move. At some point in time his health will give way, but he’s ready to travel that road.

VALENTE: At the Vatican…

ABBOT SENECAL: We sit in silence admiring beauty, and this is beauty from centuries ago. We ought to let it influence our heart, let it be a moment of reflection and yet not be intimidated by it.

VALENTE: At St. Peter’s Basilica…

ABBOT SENECAL: They let you go on this upper balcony above the Bernini altar, so I shot through the grate into the south transept gaining a sense of depth by the size of the people. This is an amazing place where amazing grace is found by many.

VALENTE: The pews at a church in Brazil…

ABBOT SENECAL: I liked the image of light—an inviting light inviting people into the church, into prayer. There’s lots of images of light in the Scriptures. Christ the light of the world, the light that enlightens us in our hearts and minds.

VALENTE: You take a lot of photographs of children.

ABBOT SENECAL: They’re natural. They don’t have to pose. People feel that if you got everything lined up it will be good. St. Thomas talks a lot about order as reflecting God’s presence. This is a fun moment, and yet we can interpret it as a way of seeing life.

I am nourished by taking pictures. Yes, it’s a spiritual exercise in that I don’t just take a picture and store it. I will reflect on it. Entering into these moments of photograph is a conviction that I’m seeing something that I didn’t make, the other person didn’t make. It’s there, it’s there because it’s part of God’s creation.

VALENTE: A grasshopper on a leaf. He wrote this reflection on the photograph.

ABBOT SENECAL: A quick camera shot, up close, holds that beauty before me. I don’t own such beauty. No one does. It is the Creator’s forever, and mine for now, and I share it with you.

VALENTE: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly this is Judy Valente at the Abbey of St. Benedict in Atchison, Kansas.

“Is there anyone here who yearns for life and desires to see good days?”

Those stirring words come from one of the most durable spiritual guides of all time, the Rule of St. Benedict.  It’s been said everything one needs to know about living the spiritual life is contained in this little book. Over the past year, this 1,500-year-old treatise has become, for me, a constant companion.

Since June of 2008, I’ve had the extraordinary opportunity to spend an average of a week a month at Mount St. Scholastica, a Benedictine monastery for women in Atchison, Kansas. I’ve been invited to share as deeply as a lay person can in the spiritual life of the sisters for a book I’ve been asked to write. I admit I questioned at first what practical wisdom a monastery might hold for a modern, married, professional woman like me. It turns out I’ve learned plenty.

I used to think of monasteries as outmoded remnants of a past era. But now, when I enter Mount St. Scholastica, I feel as if I’m peering into the future, a future our world so desperately needs—one that stresses community over competitiveness, service over self-aggrandizement, quietude over gratuitous talk, and simplicity over constant consumption. The Mount is a place where those who listen are valued as much as those who speak up; a place where people forgo personal wealth but want for nothing, where prayers are said for the victims of violent crime and bells are tolled when a Death Row prisoner is executed.

I identify now with the words of Thomas Merton, the famous Trappist monk and spiritual writer. After his first visit as a young man to the Abbey of Gethsemani, Merton wrote in his journal: “I had wondered what was holding this country together, what has been keeping the universe from cracking in pieces and falling apart. It is this monastery.”

Whenever I walk into Mount St. Scholastica, I have the sense that I’m entering a deeper reality. It starts with the beginning of the day. The sisters don’t wake up and immediately turn on National Public Radio or read The New York Times, as I do. Day begins with Morning Praise. The sisters trace the sign of the cross over their lips and say, “Lord, open my lips, and we shall proclaim your praise.” It’s a way of promising that the entire day is going to be a form of praise. It’s not about checking off all the things on one’s to-do list, or plotting to sell more things today than yesterday or, as in my case, writing more words than I did the day before. It’s about making sure everything we do in the course of the day is an act of praise, an expression of gratitude for life.

After the sisters say that little prayer, they sing. Imagine how different our days might begin, if we started out each morning singing—even just mentally singing something in our head. If you’re someone who loves Broadway show tunes, as I do, you might choose “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.” Or it could be a favorite hymn (“We Rise Again from Ashes” is one of my morning favorites).

People think of monasteries of very quiet, perhaps even lonely places. But the truth is they teem with activity. The sisters work outside at many different jobs: teaching, doing social work, counseling, and hospital chaplaincy (one at the Mount was even a firefighter, another a funeral director), but everyone also has a job to perform within the monastery. Each sister takes a turn at cleaning the bathrooms and doing the dishes (albeit with industrial-size mechanical dishwashers). Even the prioress and the PhDs have their “at bat” at these menial jobs. It’s a way of saying that all work is sacred. Ora et labora, work and prayer, is the Benedictine motto. I like to think of it not so much as work and prayer, but work as prayer.

“Let the cellarer [the monastery supply clerk] handle the kitchen utensils as if they were the sacred vessels of the altar,” St. Benedict says in the Rule. It’s a reminder to respect the common objects and utensils of our lives and a promise to extend that respect to the people around us, the community we live in, our natural resources, and our environment.

In his book on the Rule of St. Benedict (Always We Begin Again: The Benedictine Way of Living, Morehouse Publishing, 1996) John McQuiston, a trial attorney, points out, “Everything we have is on loan. Our homes, businesses, rivers, closest relationships, bodies, and experiences, everything we have is ours in trust and must be returned at the end of our use of it.” This is the way of monastics. As we continue to reap the damages of our throw-away society, we can see just how far-sighted monasteries have been.

There are some old monastic customs that the sisters don’t follow anymore, and frankly I wish some of them could become a part of our everyday lives. My friend, Sister Thomasita Homan, told me that for many years, whenever a group of sisters were assigned to work together a project, they would bow to each other and say in German (the native language of the first Benedictines in Atchison), “Have patience with me.” Imagine doing that in today’s workplace! I think about how much more pleasant it might be, when I’m out reporting a story for PBS, if I bowed to the cameraman, bowed to the producer, and they to me, and we asked each other to have patience, please, with each others’ human frailties.

Such humility forms the core of monastic life. It is especially important for Benedictines, who take a vow of stability. The vow commits them to live—and grow—with the same group of people at the same monastery for the rest of their lives. Stability recognizes, as one sister put it, that “there’s nowhere else but here.”

At Mount St. Scholastica, there are sisters who have lived together for as many as 75 years. Having moved from state to state here in the U.S. and lived in three European cities over the course of my career, the notion of spending one’s entire life in the same place seems quite foreign to me. In fact, the whole concept is alien to our highly mobile American society. Stability reminds us to grow where we’re planted. A monk was asked, “What is it then to be stable?” And he answered, “You will find stability at the moment when you discover that God is everywhere; that you do not need to seek God elsewhere. God is here, and it is useless to seek God elsewhere, because it is not God that is absent from us. It is we who are absent from God.”

Often that absence stems from a simple lack of balance. We have an abundance of food in this country, plenty of gadgets and opportunities for recreation. What we lack is time to enjoy them. The rhythm of monastic life opens the way for balance. Benedict in his Rule stipulates that monks get seven hours rest a night. Those who require more food because they are ill or weak should get it, and those who aren’t strong enough to do physical labor won’t be forced to do it. The Benedictines even go so far as to call leisure “holy.”

I saw firsthand the Benedictine way of balance when I was at Mount St. Scholastica as Lent began this year. First, the sisters enjoyed the monastic version of Mardi Gras. All of them, even the elderly ones living in the nursing home wing, gathered for beignets and hot chocolate. Not just any hot chocolate, but hot chocolate spiked with peppermint schnapps. The sisters laughed and joked and were having a grand time. But at the appointed moment, everyone got up from their tables and walked in a procession from the community room to the dining room. There, a fire blazed in the fireplace. One of the sisters carried in the palms from last year’s Palm Sunday. One by one she threw the branches in the fire to create the ashes for this year’s Ash Wednesday, and from that moment on there was complete silence in the monastery for the rest of the night and all day Ash Wednesday. A time for fun and leisure, yes, and a time to be serious and prayerful. Balance.

Perhaps the most important word I’ve learned at the monastery is a Latin word: conversatio. It refers to another one of the vows taken specifically by Benedictine monks and sisters: conversatio morum, literally “conversion of morals.” The phrase is often loosely translated as “conversion of life.” But I like the definition Sister Thomasita once gave to me:  conversatio as a constant “turning toward,” a constant conversation with life.

I like the idea of turning because it connotes change, and there are certain aspects of my life I’ve been trying to change for a long time. Like my quick temper. I find that I like the person I am at the monastery much better than the person I am in my everyday life, because when I’m at the monastery I’m calm. I’m patient. I don’t lose my temper. Once, just a few days after I returned home from the monastery, I argued with my beautiful husband. It was a totally silly, unnecessary argument, and I emailed Sister Thomasita and asked, “Why do I have these stupid arguments with my husband, who’s the person as close to me as God? Why can’t I live conversatio in my day-to-day life with the people I’m closest to? And she answered, “You are living conversatio. Your struggle. That’s the conversatio.” And that gave me hope—hope that I don’t have to be a saint. I just have to be human.

“Keep death before you daily,” Benedict says in the Rule. It’s a potent reminder not to spend my life twisting in anger or caught up with what Thomas Merton called “useless care.” My stays at the monastery propel me every day to remember what is essential, what gives my life meaning. Merton referred to it as finding “the hidden ground of our being,” finding that place where we not only discover God, but where God can discover us.

I suppose I am just one of the many Benedict has spoken to through the ages who yearns for life and desires to see good days. “Run, then,” Benedict reminds me and all of us, “while you have the light of life, that the darkness of death may not overtake you.”

Judith Valente, a contributing correspondent for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, is also a poet and co-editor with Charles Reynard of Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul (Loyola Press, 2005).

JUDY VALENTE: Sunrise at the Abbey of Gethsemani in the misty hills south of Louisville, Kentucky. The 55 Trappist monks who live here awake at 3:00 a.m. to begin their daily regimen of prayer and work — in silence. They gather for communal prayer several times a day. They will rarely venture outside the walls. For most, their lives will end here. The monks support the abbey by making fruitcakes and other products which are sold to the public. Much of the monastery’s 2,300 acres is leased to local farmers.

Brother PAUL QUENON (Trappist Monk, Abbey of Gethsemani): The essence of the Trappist life would be living in God, and I don’t think I would want to say much more than that. And of course, you’re living in God with other people in the same community, and it’s a life of continual prayer, and it’s a life of deepening — going deeper into your own capacity to love and live with God.

VALENTE: In 1941, Merton, then an aspiring young writer and a recent convert to Catholicism arrived here seeking to radically change his life. Merton was to have a striking message.

MORGAN ATKINSON (Documentary Producer): He said that anybody could have a deeply spiritual life it they care to. Any person on the street, if they were committed to it and devoted to trying it, then that path was open to them.

VALENTE: For Merton, the deeply spiritual life meant the experience of God’s presence and love at all times, combining that with action in everyday life. Paul Pearson oversees the Merton Center at Bellarmine University in Louisville.

Paul Pearson

Dr. PAUL PEARSON (Director and Archivist, The Thomas Merton Center, Bellarmine University): The essence of Merton’s spirituality is, I think, the humanity of it, that he really speaks to ordinary people. He knows so well the great classics of Christian spirituality, but he can interpret them in a way that people in our world today can understand and relate to.

VALENTE: He spoke especially to lay Catholics in what was then a firmly hierarchical church.

Dr. PEARSON: Spirituality really belonged to the monks and nuns and bishops and what have you, whereas, you know, your ordinary lay person went to Mass on Sundays, the Mass was in Latin, they said the rosary, and that was the extent of it. And Merton, I think, really opened up that whole realm of contemplation and spirituality for people.

VALENTE: Merton’s parents had died when he was young. By his own account, he lived a rootless, hedonistic life. It was rumored he had fathered a child out of wedlock while a student at the University of Cambridge. At New York’s Columbia University, he continued to feel morally adrift, emotionally bereft. As a world-weary 26-year-old, Merton wrote these words, read by Morgan Atkinson.

Mr. ATKINSON (reading from Merton’s journal): Finally has come the time to go the Trappists and try to get in and be completely quiet in the front of the face of peace. It is time to stop being sick and get really well. Out here I could think and yet could not get to any conclusions. But there was one thought running around and around in my mind: to be a monk — to be a monk!

VALENTE: Thomas Merton not only became a monk. He would become a best-selling author and one of the most influential spiritual thinkers of his time. A fellow writer called him “an investigative reporter going into the inner workings of the soul.” As a novice at Gethsemani, Brother Paul Quenon received spiritual direction from Merton, known as Father Louis.

Brother Paul Quenon

Brother QUENON: He doesn’t think of the whole world as, you know, monks. But on the other hand, he can talk to the monk in each person. He sees it as a deep enough thing, that somehow everybody has the capacity to come to the same intensity and depth of experience of God.

Dr. PEARSON: This exhibit is all of Merton’s published work with their varying editions and foreign translations. Merton’s now been translated into I think it’s 30 languages.

VALENTE: In 1948, when he was 33 years old, Merton published his autobiography, “The Seven Storey Mountain,” taking his title from a scene in Dante’s “Purgatory.” The book became an overnight bestseller.  Sister Suzanne Zuercher is a Benedictine nun who has written extensively about Merton.

Sister SUZANNE ZUERCHER, OSB: I knew I needed to be in monastic life. I knew he was someone who spoke to me as no one had every spoken to me. He’s funny, he’s profound, he’s human, he’s down to earth, he’s practical, he’s concrete.

VALENTE: Mike Brennan is a baggage handler for American Airlines in Chicago. His home is full of Merton books and memorabilia.

MIKE BRENNAN (Baggage Handler, American Airlines): Working at O’Hare Airport, noisy, crazy, constant activity, constant stimulation, it’s really nice to find a way to let go of all that stimulus and activity and think of being connected with the Lord, and I learned than from Merton.

VALENTE: Merton’s fame allowed him to correspond with presidents, popes, and Nobel Prize winners. But as his public reputation grew, he retreated further into solitude and silence. He would spend a few hours a day in this small wooden shed writing and meditating. But it wasn’t enough.

Brother QUENON: He wanted to have more time for writing, for meditation.

VALENTE: He would later get permission from his abbot to live as a hermit in this tiny cottage about a half-mile from the monastery.

Brother QUENON: He loved being in the midst of nature, you know. The birds were his friends.

VALENTE: What do you think he did out here?

Brother QUENON: Well, read a lot and wrote. For him, praying was just to abide in the presence, the presence of the Lord.

(touring cottage): There’s the kitchen and then a bedroom, and then a chapel was added later on.

VALENTE: Merton wrote this in his journal:

Mr. ATKINSON (reading from Merton’s journal): For myself I have only one desire and that is the desire for solitude: to disappear into God; to be submerged in His peace; to be lost in the secret of His space. I have gone to the hermitage not because I hate the world. I go to the hermitage to deepen my consciousness, to be more in communion with the world.

Thomas Merton

VALENTE: His output was enormous. Over a 20-year period he would write 60 books on topics ranging from contemplative prayer to nonviolence. He also wrote poetry, essays, and criticism. In the 1960s, Merton became increasingly controversial. He began writing on issues of the day like civil rights, materialism, and the nuclear arms race. His superiors blocked the publication of some of his most strident anti-war writings.

Dr. PEARSON: As he changed from the world-denying monk to the world-embracing monk of the ’60s, you know, people began to think “why should he be writing on these issues. He’s away in a monastery. What does he know about them?’”

VALENTE: In 1966, Merton spent several weeks in a Louisville hospital, recovering from back surgery. There he met and fell in love with a young student nurse. He was 51 years old at the time.

Sister SUZANNE ZUERCHER, O.S.B. (Merton Author): It was very brief. It was very intense. It was very passionate. He sometimes felt he had abandoned his vows, and at other times he felt he was living the vows of growth and fulfillment.

VALENTE: The two would sometimes meet clandestinely in secluded parts of the monastery grounds. Within a matter of months, the relationship was over. But Merton had been changed.

Sr. SUZANNE: From that time on he never again thought of himself as being unloved or unlovable, and he himself learned to love in this relationship and that it was the part of himself that he always felt had been underdeveloped.

VALENTE: Merton rededicated himself to his monastic life. He became increasingly interested in Buddhism and Asian monasticism. In 1968, he received permission to attend a conference on monasticism in Bangkok. There is rare footage of Merton from that conference.

THOMAS MERTON (in video from 1968 Bangkok conference): That’s a thing of the past now, to be suspicious of other religions, and to look always at what is weakest in other religions and what is highest in our own religion. This double standard of dealing with religions — this has to stop.

“Our real journey is interior.”

VALENTE: Hours after this film was made Merton was dead, electrocuted after touching a fan with faulty wiring in his hotel room. He was 53. His reputation has only grown since his death. Working with manuscripts he left behind, scholars have published 60 more of his books, including seven volumes of his personal journals. But as a monk, Merton left behind few personal possessions: his work shirt, a cup, boots, eyeglasses.

Dr. PEARSON: With the death of Thomas Merton we lost really one of the great Catholic voices, one of the great prophetic figures within the Catholic Church, and I think that’s why his books are still selling, why they’re still being translated, because that message is as relevant today as when he wrote it.

VALENTE: Toward the end of his life Merton wrote, “Our real journey is interior.” For those seeking to take that journey, he remains an essential guide.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Judy Valente at the Abbey of Gethsemani.

Q: What would you say is the essence of Thomas Merton’s spirituality?

A: The essence of Merton’s spirituality is, I think, the humanity of it, that he really speaks to ordinary people. You know, I don’t think there’s anything particularly new in it. He knows so well the great classics of Christian spirituality, but he can interpret them in a way that people in our world today can understand and can relate to, and I think that was his great contribution, and in the period when he started writing, in the late ’40s and the ’50s, certainly within the Catholic Church prior to the Second Vatican Council, that kind of spirituality was unheard of for your ordinary lay person. Spirituality really belonged to the monks and nuns and bishops and what have you, whereas, you know, your ordinary lay person went to Mass on Sundays, the Mass was in Latin, they said the rosary, and that was the extent of it, and Merton, I think, really opened up that whole realm of contemplation and spirituality for people, and so much that we’re familiar with now came about through that.

Q: Was that his main message to lay people, to the ordinary person, that you too can enter into this type of deep union with God?

A: I think it was in the early days. In the early days, you know, Merton gives the impression that all he’s interested in is a spiritual life, that he’d entered Gethsemani in 1941, and he was turning his back on the evil world outside the monastery. But I think gradually, through his experience in the monastery, through the response to the publication of The Seven Storey Mountain and all the correspondence that he received from people, in dealing with the young men who he was teaching at monastery, Merton realized that he couldn’t leave the world behind at the monastery gate, that he was actually in the monastery for the world. And so his spirituality began to change so that it involved tackling the issues that were of concern to everybody in the world. So in some ways it’s his combination of contemplation and action, I think, that really marks out his spirituality. You know, I think in that period probably there was lots of writing about spirituality. But none of it combined it with action in the same way that Merton did.

Q: What were some of those issues he was concerned about getting people thinking about out in the world and relating to their religious life, their spiritual lives?

A: I think initially some of the issues Merton was most concerned about, you know, were the major issues facing society at that time, and especially going into the ’60s issues surrounding the Cold War, so to do with the nuclear arms race, issues to do with war and peace and nonviolence.
And then, as the ’60s wore on, things like, obviously, the Vietnam War came up and, you know, you can just see similarities with the world today. You know, we seem to have got over the Cold War of the ’60s and now, you know, you’ve got, you know, relations with China or Russia seem to be changing all the time. But then he also began writing about issues to do with civil rights, and certainly prejudice hasn’t gone away in our own day, and gradually beginning to touch on other issues such as feminism, the use and abuse of technology, the effects of the media, ecology. Merton was one of the first people to review Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, and he also had it read in the monastic refectory and was very much involved with reforestation at the monastery, you know, concerned about the impact that the monks had had on the local environment.

Q: Why do you think people still find him so compelling today and are still reading his books today?

A: I think people are still reading Merton’s books today because he speaks so clearly about all the issues that we’re still dealing with. You know, I think if he were to come back he would be very frustrated with us that we don’t seem to have learned anything; that, if anything, many of those issues that he was writing about have been magnified or they’ve become more kind of ingrained in society, if anything. You know, a lot of the segregation in the ’60s was very marked, whereas now, you know, I think there are more subtle forms of segregation which maybe are even worse than what it was like then. I know people refer to things like ecological racism and things like that and, you know, we can still learn a lot from his writings.

Q: He was extremely prolific. How was he able to accomplish so much in a period of basically 20 years?

A: Merton was, you know, just an extraordinary figure in the way that he wrote. You know, Seven Storey Mountain was published in 1948, and he died in 1968, and the number of books he wrote during that period, you know, along with articles or journals and all the other work that he was doing, teaching first to scholastics and then to novices, the spiritual life of the community, spiritual direction, and yet he wrote this incredible number of books. And I think people often think that he just wrote and published, that, you know, as it flowed off his pen it was ready for publication. But it wasn’t, and we’ve certainly got manuscripts here where you can see him reworking and reworking his material. So, for example, with The Sign of Jonas we actually have five variant typescripts, and that’s not an issue like today of just inserting a few paragraphs on the computer. It’s retyping a whole typescript of 400-plus pages.

Paul Pearson

Q: But how do you think he was able to do that? What enabled him to be so prolific and productive?

A: I think it was an incredible sense of focus, that he could really focus on what he was doing. I think one of the monks told me the story that, you know, with Merton if, you know, a book arrived in the mail in the morning he would’ve read the book, he would’ve drafted a review, revised the review, and had it ready to mail back to a major magazine by lunchtime and that it would be, you know, fit to be published in the New Yorker, or somewhere. Whereas, I know if I write a book review it takes me weeks. So he just works on a different intellectual level and, you know, monks will say that he never wasted a moment of time, that if he was sitting outside the abbot’s office for a meeting, he would be working, and when he was giving spiritual direction he was, you know, always there with the person, but when he felt that the time had come to an end, that they were wasting time, he soon cut it off.

Q: What made him controversial?

A: Merton became controversial because of his movement away from just writing about spirituality and beginning to write about the issues of his day. You know, I think people love that monk who would write, you know, these wonderful books about spirituality that flowed from his pen or off his typewriter in the ’50s. But as he changed from the world-denying monk to the world-embracing monk of the ’60s, you know, people began to think, “Well, why should he be writing on these issues? He’s away in a monastery. What does he know about them?” And especially when he began criticizing some of the viewpoints that the people were taking, or that the government was taking or the Church at that time, and certainly within the Catholic Church. The first Catholic was in the White House, and so I think there was a sense with a lot of Catholics of loyalty to the country, and yet here was Merton criticizing some of the stances that were being taken by the government. I think nowadays Catholics would much more readily agree that would be the position, you know, they should be taking. But that wasn’t the case in the ’60s.

Q: How about his inquiries into Eastern monasticism, Eastern religions? How controversial and unusual was that?

A: It was certainly unusual in that period, and I don’t think I would say it was controversial in the ’60s. I think in some ways people were much more open to it at that time than maybe they are nowadays. But certainly when, you know, in the late ’50s Merton first started working with students from other Christian denominations, you know, seminarians from the Presbyterian seminary here in Louisville or the Southern Baptist seminary would go down to dialogue with Merton and other members of the community, and that was really unheard of within Catholic circles prior to the Second Vatican Council. And then, gradually, you know, he began to expand that through his correspondence with peoples of other faiths, and often, then, those people would come and visit him at Gethsemani, and he would get them to talk to the novices or to the community. And so there was a real interfaith dialogue that was being generated from Gethsemani, and dialogue not about issues of doctrine, which they’d often not agree about, but more of an experiential approach to God, which was more monastic, in a sense: how do we pray, how do we understand God, and things like that.

Q: What makes him controversial today, to the extent that the Catholic bishops would not even include his biography in an official catechism?

A: I think people get the impression, and you know, I think it’s a very shallow reading of Merton, was that he was, you know, ready when he went to Asia to become a Buddhist or something, and, you know, they’re not seeing what was written in his books when they take it in that way. You know, I think Merton was able to dialogue with people of other faiths because he was so firmly rooted in his own tradition. It wasn’t any wishy-washy New Age kind of thing. Merton could dialogue from within the tradition, and, you know, if you look at his last entries in his personal journal in Asia, he talks about celebrating Mass. He’s got his Latin breviaries with him. He still preferred the Latin to the English translations. He was having lunch with the apostolic delegate, and the conference that he died at was a conference of First-World monasteries assisting Third-World monasteries, you know, Benedictine and Cistercian monks and nuns. Merton wasn’t about to become a Buddhist monk, and, you know, I think there’s a certain element in the Catholic Church that, you know, is almost going back to the pre-Vatican II days that there’s no salvation outside the Church, that kind of attitude. And, you know, I think it was pressure from that group that led to Merton being taken out of the catechism. And yet I hear young people saying, you know, it’s just a sign of how out of touch the bishops are that they would remove somebody like Merton and yet leave in all these other people who, you know, are not relevant to our modern world.

Q: What are some of the main things you think Thomas Merton would have to say to today’s seekers, to today’s world?

A: What would Merton have to say to today’s world? In many ways, I’m not sure it would be that different from what he was writing in the ’60s. I think that’s why his books are still selling, why they’re still being translated, because that message is as relevant today as when he wrote it. You know, just encouraging people to persevere in their spiritual journey, to see how their spirituality integrates with their daily life, with their social life, with their involvement with the world and with politics. I think if people really took that message seriously, you know, the world could change drastically. But people don’t. It’s a difficult message.

Q: Could you briefly describe how he died, how that transpired?

A: Merton died in Asia at a conference in Bangkok. He’d been invited there by a Benedictine monk to give the keynote address, and he did the address, his address, on the morning of December the 10th, 1968, and then sometime in the afternoon, after lunch apparently, he’d had a siesta and took a shower and then after his shower went to adjust one of these large, freestanding electric fans that was in his room, and he was electrocuted by touching faulty wiring on the fan. And, of course, the voltage in Thailand is much higher than here. I think it’s 220 or 240 volts.

Q: Would it be fair to say Thomas Merton was ahead of his time, and in what way?

A: I think so, in a number of ways, and yet in some ways he’s so deeply in the tradition. But, you know, that’s a part in the tradition that often gets overlooked. I think in the church fathers he would find this very different vision of the world, and so although I would say, yes, he was definitely ahead of his time, being ahead of his time was based on the tradition, and he discovered that through his reading, you know, of the monastic fathers, the church fathers, about how they worked with the society of their day. You get this impression of the monks in the early centuries going off into the desert and turning their back on the world. But then you hear these stories of, you know, the emperor or the leading people of their day going to the monks to consult with them about the issues they were concerned about and, you know, these monks off in the desert giving the leaders advice. And in a sense that’s just what Merton was doing in the ’60s, you know, he was communicating with people all over the world: popes, presidents, Nobel Prize winners and, you know, they saw that he had a wisdom that our world needed then and still needs today.

Q: What did the world lose by his dying in his prime?

A: I think with the death of Thomas Merton we lost, really, one of the great Catholic voices, one of the great prophetic figures within the Catholic Church. You know, it’s hard to imagine what he would be doing if he were still alive today and, you know, he could be. He’d be in his 90s, but he could still be alive. In many ways he would be saying the same things he was saying in the ’60s, which is a very sad reflection on us that we don’t seem to have moved forward, or moved forward in the right direction. And yet, you know, he was writing about technology and computers, and all of those things have developed so much more since he was writing about them. I think we miss out on how he himself would have carried his thought forward, how he would have tackled the issues in the way that we’re facing them nowadays.

Q: Describe for me what you think is the essence of the Trappist life.

A: Well, the essence of the Trappist life would be living in God, and I don’t think I would want to say much more than that. Of course, you’re living in God with other people in the same community, and it’s a life of continual prayer, and it’s a life of deepening, going deeper into your own capacity to love and to live with God.

Q: How would you describe the day of a Trappist, the spiritual discipline?

A: Well, the day of a Trappist is rather monotonous, but it’s full of activities. It’s monotonous in the sense that one day pretty much looks like another day. We get up at 3:00 in the morning and the first prayer is at 3:15. And then it’s still dark, you know, and it’s a nice, quiet time for reading until about 5:45 when we have Lauds, which is, you know, like a 25 minute prayer, choral prayer. Mass follows that and work begins at 8:00 in the morning. We work for four hours through, until 12:00. Then 12:15 is midday prayer, then lunch after that. We have the main meal in the middle of the day, and there’s a break until None, which is at 2:15, and then work in the afternoon or some, maybe, yard work or time to read, to do extra things. Vespers is 5:30 in the evening, supper after that, and then Compline at 7:30, and we go to bed at 8 o’clock. We still get seven hours of sleep.

Brother Paul Quenon

Q: Did Thomas Merton influence your decision to come to the monastery?

A: Well, Merton did influence me. I read THE SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN when I was deliberating about entering a monastery. I’d already developed a thought reading THE IMITATION OF CHRIST, and then I could see that a modern man can do such a thing and that there actually is a monastery in the United States called Gethsemani Abbey. So I was, of course, filled with the images that he had in the book in anticipation about what the life could be.

Q: Tell me what he was like to live with.

A: Well, Merton – I call him Father Louis, because that was his religious name and that’s how I spoke to him – he was good humored, good natured, buoyant, and resilient. He was also pretty intense, because he was always working. If he wasn’t getting some course work ready, he was writing. And then when he did go to the lumber shed or to the woods to meditate, that’s what he was doing. He had a place where they use to split the logs for the wood furnace, the wood boiler, and he loved to go down there and sit on the hay bales and write his journal. He had this thick bookkeeper’s ledger book which served for his private journals, so when he was down there he was alone. He’d either meditate or fill out his ledger book.

Q: What can you tell us that might be surprising about him, or not so well known to those who read his books?

A: Well, he had false teeth. He actually had false teeth that he took out at night, so I’ve disclosed the worst about Thomas Merton. Actually, his health was not as good as you would expect, because he seemed vigorous. He had a lot of – he was on a special diet. He ate in the infirmary kitchen area, which was a kind of separate room from the monks’ refectory. They were served meat in that. That’s why it had to be separate, so the rest of us wouldn’t have our appetites whetted. I think probably he was a lot funnier than people expect when they’re reading his books. Father Louis had a quick wit. It’s not like he liked to tell jokes. He didn’t [tell] like formal jokes. He would just, on the spur of the moment, come up with something.

Q: Are there any vivid personal memories of him you can share?

A: Of course there are many just incidental things that I could think of. I’m thinking now of when we used to go out in a straight line to cut corn with machetes under our arms, all wearing the old blue denim work blouse and then the leggings, and he would be at the head of the line of novices with his straw hat on, and he had a way of walking which, to me, reflected the way a sheaf of corn flops to the side, and he kind of had like a farmer’s strut about him. He obviously enjoyed what he was doing in going out with us.

Q: How did he affect your own spiritual journey?

A: When I used to have spiritual direction with Father Louis, which would be about once every two weeks, one of the moments that comes back to me from time to time is when we were talking about prayer and that prayer is like a struggle with God. It’s like Jacob struggling with the angel in the night, and when you’re encountering God God is not a thing, and so God is more like nothing, so when you enter into the depth of prayer it’s like entering into nothingness. And of course, that’s very central to his whole spirituality.

Q: What was the core of his spirituality?

A: Well, hopefully God was the core of Merton’s spirituality; I think the quest for God in solitude and this coming to the innermost core of your self. You know, he says contemplation is an answer to a call, a call from one who has no voice but who speaks in everything that is, and most of all in the depths of our own being. And so for him there was a mystery about the self, which was like the mystery of God, and they’re just really all one mystery as far as we are concerned. It’s in the process of coming to knowledge of yourself that you come to knowledge of God, or even truer to say that in coming to knowledge of God in a direct way is the only place you come to knowledge of yourself. We are a mystery unto ourselves, and God is a mystery, and the two mysteries merge, and to accept that kind of helplessness, the human mind is helpless in the face of all this. To accept that kind of poverty and emptiness would be the whole atmosphere of Merton’s spirituality.

Q: Why do so many successive generations continue to find his writing so compelling?

A: Well, Merton was a very sincere person. He, you know, was eloquent, but his eloquence came from a kind of directness and honesty about what he’s experiencing. I mean, he was a very sophisticated writer. But he had to learn how to live with himself. He was very quick to say things, but he was also somebody who spoke with a lot of sincerity, and that’s human. That appeals to people.

Q: Why do people not in monastic life respond so positively to what he wrote?

A: That’s still a mystery to me. I think he started out with [the idea] that he would be writing little book reviews in the back of some obscure journal and had no idea that he was going to become a famous writer. Merton was very human, so that, immediately, is one appeal. The other is that he consciously approaches it. He writes for monks, certainly. I mean that’s at the core, and his best writing is for monks about monastic topics, but he was a cosmopolitan, so he always had a broader audience in view. And he is not sectarian. I mean, he’s radically a Christian, but I think he keeps the broader perspective in mind, and he doesn’t think the whole world are monks. But on the other hand, he can talk to the monk in each person. He sees it as a deep enough thing that somehow everybody has the capacity to come to that same kind of intensity and depth of experience of God. And he was convinced, you know, we’re all called to experience God, if not in this life certainly in the next, but hopefully in this life, and so he spoke to awaken that in people.

Q: What do you think he came to this monastery seeking?

A: Well, Merton came to the Abbey at Gethsemani because he perceived it as dedicated to the contemplative life, a simple life, monks who lived in poverty and in silence. I’m not sure he was even aware that there were other such monasteries in the United States at the time. He always had a kind of a dream of that since he was a child, when he would look through these picture books of medieval monasteries in Europe, and some kind of a dream was awakened in him. And he came down here to make a retreat and discovered, just by immediate contact, what the place was – men who are just totally dedicated to the life of prayer, and their whole life is centered around that. That was somehow a dream reawakened.

Q: Is there anything else you want to add about Merton or the monastery?

A: Well, it has been forty years since Father Louis died. We’ve come a long way since then, and a lot of it has been under the impetus that he had, the waves that he made. And I think it’s been a good, for the most part it’s been a good effect. We certainly have a more, a broader perspective on life. I think we have become so popular we’re almost too popular nowadays, and so we’re reevaluating what are the radical qualities of the Cistercian life, and Merton has been somebody who has given us a voice about that. And so he continues to speak to monks and at the same time continues to be a challenge to monks. We have a better appreciation of the variety of vocations within the monastic life. We have developed an appreciation for the solitary life of a hermit, and we have a better appreciation of the intellectual challenges that are present to us in the monastic life which were not considered something a monk would aspire to, but the fact of the matter is that Merton was an example of what can be done within the context of monastic life.

Q: And his interest in Eastern religions is an example as well?

A: Yes, I think we have found a kinship with Buddhist monks. They come here in small groups, and I’ll be meeting with [one] tomorrow, and perhaps at the beginning of November another small group will be coming. Matthieu Ricard came in the spring. He’s been associated with the Dalai Lama for 17 years at least. So there’s a kind of universality that we appreciate more now than we ever did before.