JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: The lumber shed at the Abbey of Gethsemani in northern Kentucky. It’s late February. Each night at 8:00 Brother Paul Quenon walks to the shed, as he has every night for 20 years. He goes around back, where he finds his mattress. This is where he will sleep—outdoors, no matter the weather.

BROTHER PAUL QUENON (The Abbey of Gethsemani): I can’t be a full-time hermit, but I can be a night-time hermit, and there’s something about waking up in the middle of the night, and there’s nobody around. There’s a kind of an edge of solitude that you cannot experience in any other way.

VALENTE: Here, a monk seeks to live every moment in the presence of God, in unity with God. Brother Paul came to Gethsemani 52 years ago. He was 17, inspired by reading the autobiography of the famous Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who introduced many Americans to the contemplative life. Merton would eventually become his spiritual director and would encourage Brother Paul to write. Thomas Merton said monks and poets are people who live on the margins of society. Brother Paul decided to become both. He says monks and poets remind us to pay attention to the world around us, to focus on what’s essential.

BROTHER PAUL: Poetry is the language of the heart, and it’s the language of the imagination, and so the mind abides in silence. Contemplation is an abiding in silence, and what comes out of silence are words of the heart, words of love. When the heart is really full, the mouth goes silent.

VALENTE: Indeed, many contemplatives say the transcendent is beyond words. Brother Paul has published three books of his poetry and is working on a fourth.

BROTHER PAUL: “The Hood”: —a hiding place / for the head / a portable anonymity / a refuge from / artificial light / a cover to make / dimness dimmer / to make time slow down

VALENTE: Ideas for his poems usually come to him on long, solitary walks across the monastery’s vast stretches of woods and fields. During each walk he writes a haiku—a Japanese form of poetry usually three lines, seventeen syllables and set in nature.

BROTHER PAUL: The monastery is a poetic context to begin with, and we live in a beautiful environment, and nature is so present day in and day out. I discovered the haiku, and the haiku is such a short form I started combining it with my meditation practice:

“Above dim snow fields / lone light of Venus, lone wail of goose / pleading for spring”

You’re in God’s beauty, and it’s physical. It’s almost like a symphony flowing by me as I walk along, relaxed, and it’s a beautiful experience.

VALENTE: Occasionally over the years, he would climb to the top of this water tower until finally the abbot closed it off. Brother Paul quips, “This used to be a fun place.”

It was this little cottage, The Hermitage, where Thomas Merton spent years in isolation, praying and writing. Retreatants visit the abbey year round, seeking to slow down at a place where prayer is the main form of activity.

BROTHER PAUL: I think they come here seeking for quiet and, you know, an atmosphere of prayer, and maybe some seeds of wisdom, and just to see what it is to live this kind of life.

VALENTE: What purpose do you see in living the Trappist’s life in the modern world?

BROTHER PAUL: Well, I think the purpose of the monastic life in the modern world is to show that we don’t need a purpose. The purpose of life is life, and you are to be just to be. Everybody measures their importance by how useful they are, so you need to shatter that. You know, somebody has to come along now and then just say listen, you know, that’s not it. That’s not what life is.

VALENTE: Forty-eight monks now live at the abbey. Once, there were more than 200. Brother Paul says many people are still attracted to the regular prayer and quiet rhythms of monastic life, but few are willing to stay.

BROTHER PAUL: I wish they would perceive the genuineness of the life. A man has to have, you know, a home and a career, and these are ways of achieving identity. Well, what we do is in a sense forsake our identity. We give up our identity to get a new identity, which really God formulates for us.

VALENTE: And yet Brother Paul says you don’t have to live in a monastery to seek what is important.

BROTHER PAUL: If you just sort of rest with what you have, be grateful for it, there again the chemistry of gratitude can transform what you have. Contemplation is simply maybe a big fat word for gratitude. To sense the presence of God in life and around me and in other people gives me a very deep gratitude.

VALENTE: Today the average age of the monks here is 70. Funerals are a regular part of life.

BROTHER PAUL: A monk lives in the presence of death, and you come here to die. You’re going to give up your whole life. If you decide to give up your whole life to Christ, well, it’s in Christ’s hand.

“Curved Walkway”: The burial ground fills with practical sounds from Tierce bell, drenching the dumb unheeding crosses. Alone I skirt around this rim of destiny, stirred by the bell… ‘til someday I’m left un-busied in this ground’s silent keep.

VALENTE: Brother Paul says that to be a monk is to live at the heart of a mystery, to live in a perpetual state of becoming. To him, that is both the power and poetry of monastic life.

BROTHER PAUL: We never get there. As Merton said, you know, if you think you have arrived you’re lost. People in the world come, you know, they come here on retreat. They ask me, “How long have you been here?” I answer as, what, another elsewhere, 52 years. But it is a fiction. How long have I been here? Excuse me, I haven’t gotten here yet.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, this is Judy Valente at the Abbey of Gethsemani.

The Cowl

–solemn as chant,
one sweep of fabric
from head to foot.
Cowls hanging
on a row of pegs—
tall disembodied spirits
holding shadows
deep in the folds
waiting for light,
for light to shift
waiting for a bell
for the reach of my hand
to spread out the slow
wings, release the
shadows and envelope my
prayer-hungry body
with light.

My Novices: late 1950s

Young men came
looking for
–don’t know what–
Left the place
looking for
-don’t know what–
Of these I had no regrets.

Some came, seemed like
looking–
heard some talk about
-what-
stayed awhile
and left
talking like– Well,–
like somewhat.

Serious young men came looking.
took up talk about,
-don’t know what,
stayed long and left
talking
about everything what-not.

Some came completely
clear and sure about
what–
Those I sent away.

Silent young men, a few,
came looking for–
don’t know what-
stayed
and kept on looking
stayed and never got to
what–
wore out,
died,
had never stopped looking for
what–
For these I have no regrets.

All of these I loved, but
seems the part I loved the best
was–
don’t know what–

Confessions of a Dead-Beat Monk

Of course, I’ve set the same bench
brushing off flies and thoughts,
how many years? What winters of
silence and summer variations,

what prodigious mockingbirds
I’ve heard! And that kitchen job!
Broccoli and spuds on Mondays,
rice twice a week, and Oh,

toasted cheese sandwiches,
Fridays! This diet of psalms,
fifty and hundred, runs ever
on from bitter to sweet,

returns like the sun to bow
and stand. And I tread the same
stairs and stare at walls, blank
or lit rose and gold. I rise

with whippoorwills singing
at 3, though night ever keeps
its secret from me, ‘till in
its treasure I’m locked.

Then I will be what always
has been, that enigma of
sameness between
now and the then.

My Last Poem

When I write my last poem
it will not say good-by
to poetry, but hello to itself,

will heave a glad sigh
it got into the world
before the door closed,

will look to its companion poems,
that it might have place
among these orphans,

that they might reach out hands
in company to go together
into oblivion or into memory,

or to some secret cove
where eternity sits,
from time to time, and reads.

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).

Tweet

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: 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.