The Waters of Siloe

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Daily Life of a Cistercian Monk in Our Time

  Prologue

  Note on the Function of a Contemplative Order

  Part One

  Monasticism; St. Benedict; The Cistercians

  De Rance and La Trappe

  The Dispersal; First Trappists in America

  Foundations in Kentucky and Illinois

  The Trappists in Nova Scotia; Petit Clairvaux

  The Foundation of Gethsemani Abbey

  Photos

  Gethsemani in the Nineteenth Century; OtherAmerican Foundations

  Reunion of the Cistercian Congregations; New Growth; Gethsemani under Dom Edmond Obrecht

  Eight American Foundations

  A Contemplative Order in Two World Wars

  The Rising Tide: New Foundations in Georgia, Utah, and New Mexico; The Last Mass at Yang Kia Ping

  Part Two

  Cistercian Life in the Twelfth Century

  The Cistercian Character and Sanctity

  Paradisus Claustralis

  Bibliography

  Glossary of Some Monastic Terms

  Index

  About the Author

  Footnotes

  Copyright 1949 by Thomas Merton

  Copyright renewed 1977 by The Trustees of the Merton Legacy Trust

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Ex Parte Ordinis

  Nihil Obstat: FR. M. GABRIEL O’CONNELL, O.C.R.

  FR. M. ANTHONY CHASSAGNE, O.C.R.

  Imprimi Potest: FR. M. DOMINIQUE NOGUES, O.C.R., Abbot General

  Nihil Obstat: JOHN M. A. FEARNS, S.T.D., Censor librorum

  Imprimatur:

  FRANCIS CARDINAL SPELLMAN, Archbishop of New York

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Merton, Thomas, 1915–1968.

  The waters of Siloe.

  (A Harvest book)

  Bibliography: p.

  Includes index.

  I. Trappists. I. Title.

  BX4102.M4 1979 271'.125 79-10372

  ISBN 0-15-694954-7

  eISBN 978-0-547-56395-4

  v2.1017

  TO EVELYN WAUGH

  THERE IS intoxication in the waters of contemplation, whose mystery fascinated and delighted the first Cistercians and whose image found its way into the names of so many of those valley monasteries that stood in forests, on the banks of clean streams, among rocks alive with springs.

  These are the waters which the world does not know, because it prefers the water of bitterness and contradiction. These are the waters of peace, of which Christ said: “He that shall drink of the water that I shall give him, shall not thirst for ever. But the water that I shall give him shall become in him a fountain of water, springing up into life everlasting.”

  These are the Waters of Siloe, that flow in silence.

  The Daily Life of a Cistercian Monk in Our Time

  WINTER

  SUMMER

  A.M.

  A.M.

  2:00

  Rise, go to choir, recite Matins and Lauds of Our Lady’s Office.

  2:00

  As in Winter.

  2:30

  Meditation.

  2:30

  As in Winter.

  3:00

  Night Office (Canonical Matins and Lauds).

  3:00

  As in Winter.

  (about)4:00

  Priests say their private Masses, others go to Communion. Then there is time for reading or private prayer.

  4:00

  As in Winter.

  5:30

  Prime, followed by Chapter.*

  5:30

  As in winter.

  6:30-7:45

  Reading, study or private prayer.

  6:30

  Mixt [breakfast].

  7:45

  Tierce, High Mass, Sext.

  6:45-9:00

  Work. (The students have classes or study.)

  9:00

  Reading or prayer.

  9:00-10:45

  Work. (The students have classes or study.)

  9:30

  Tierce, High Mass, Sext.

  10:45-11:07

  Reading or private prayer.

  11:00

  Dinner.

  11:07

  None [the fifth of the seven canonical hours].

  P.M.

  12:00-1:00

  Meridienne [siesta].

  11:30

  Dinner.

  1:07

  None.

  P.M.

  P.M.

  12:15-1:30

  Reading, private prayer.

  1:30-2:00

  Reading, private prayer.

  1:30-3:30

  Work.

  2:00-4:30

  Work.

  3:30-4:30

  Reading or private prayer.

  4:30-5:15

  Reading or private prayer.

  (about) 4:30

  Vespers.

  5:15

  Vespers.

  5:15

  Meditation.

  5:45

  Meditation.

  5:30

  Collation [light refreshment].

  6:00

  Supper.

  5:40-6:10

  Reading, prayer.

  6:30-7:10

  Reading, prayer.

  6:10

  Compline, † Salve Regina, examination of conscience.

  7:10

  Compline, † Salve Regina, examination of conscience.

  7:00

  All go to bed.

  8:00

  All go to bed.

  (The day of a Lay-brother includes more work, less prayer, and not so much fasting.)

  Prologue

  IT IS late at night. Most of the Paris cafés have closed their doors and pulled down their shutters and locked them to the sidewalk. Lights are reflected brightly in the wet, empty pavement. A taxi stops to let off a passenger and moves away again, its red tail-light disappearing around the corner.

  The man who has just alighted follows a bellboy through the whirling door into the lobby of one of the big Paris hotels. His suitcase is bright with labels that spell out the names of hotels that existed in the big European cities before World War II. But the man is not a tourist. You can see that he is a businessman, and an important one. This is not the kind of hotel that is patronized by mere voyageurs de commerce. He is a Frenchman, and he walks through the lobby like a man who is used to stopping at the best hotels. He pauses for a moment, fumbling for some change, and the bellboy goes ahead of him to the elevator.

  The traveler is suddenly aware that someone is looking at him. He turns around. It is a woman, and to his astonishment she is dressed in the habit of a nun.

  If he knew anything about the habits worn by the different religious orders, he would recognize the white cloak and brown robe as belonging to the Discalced Carmelites. But what on earth would a man in his position know about Discalced Carmelites? He is far too important and too busy to worry his head about nuns and religious orders—or about churches for that matter, although he occasion
ally goes to Mass as a matter of form.

  The most surprising thing of all is that the nun is smiling, and she is smiling at him. She is a young sister, with a bright, intelligent French face, full of the candor of a child, full of good sense: and her smile is a smile of frank, undisguised friendship. The traveler instinctively brings his hand to his hat, then turns away and hastens to the desk, assuring himself that he does not know any nuns. As he is signing the register, he cannot help glancing back over his shoulder. The nun is gone.

  Putting down the pen, he asks the clerk, “Who was that nun that just passed by?”

  “I beg your pardon, monsieur. What was that you said?”

  “That nun—who was she, anyway? The one that just went by and smiled at me.”

  The clerk arches his eyebrows.

  “You are mistaken, monsieur. A nun, in a hotel, at this time of night! Nuns don’t go wandering around town, smiling at men!”

  “I know they don’t. That’s why I would like you to explain the fact that one came up and smiled at me just now, here in this lobby.”

  The clerk shrugs: “Monsieur, you are the only person that has come in or gone out in the last half hour.”

  Not long after, the traveler who saw that nun in the Paris hotel was no longer an important French industrialist, and he did know something about religious habits. In fact, he was wearing one. It was brown: a brown robe, with a brown scapular over it, and a thick leather belt buckled about the waist. His head was shaved and he had grown a beard. And he wore a grimy apron to protect his robe from axle grease. He was lying on his back underneath a partly disemboweled tractor. There was a wrench in his hand and black smudges all around his eyes where he had been wiping the sweat with the back of his greasy hands. He was a lay brother in the most strictly enclosed, the poorest, the most laborious, and one of the most austere orders in the Church.

  He had become a Trappist in a southern French abbey. He knew no more of hotels or big cities, because he was living now in the monastery that had been built eight hundred years before by Cistercian monks from Burgundy. And he was living pretty much the way they had lived before him, fasting, praying, reading, keeping silence with his tongue in order that the depths of his mind and heart might be free to seek God—the silent, secret, yet obvious presence of God that is known to the contemplative and unknown to anyone else: not so much because it is unintelligible as because its very excess of intelligibility blinds us and makes us incapable of grasping it. Perhaps the fact that he was working on a tractor instead of on an ox-cart might constitute an accidental difference between him and the monks of the twelfth century; but that is a minor point indeed.

  The thing that needs to be stressed about this story is that it is true. That lay brother is living today in the abbey of Aiguebelle, and the reason he is there is to be traced ultimately to the fact that one night he walked into a Paris hotel and saw a nun smiling at him, though the clerk told him no nun was there.

  A few days later he saw a picture of the very same nun in the house of some friends. They told him that her name was St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus. Of course he had heard of St. Thérèse. Once more he became interested in the religion he had neglected for so many years. And before long his beard had grown and his head was shaved and he was lying underneath a tractor in a brown robe with axle grease all over his face.

  Things like that also happen in America. I do not say that men see apparitions and then run off to become Trappists. It is not necessary to have peculiar experiences before you can become a monk. As a general rule you are better off without experiences. However, there are other experiences, more terrible yet easier to explain—the kind produced by war.

  There was a young corporal in the United States Marines who found out at very close quarters what happened to the dead bodies of men left unburied at Okinawa. Then he read a newspaper article about Trappist monks who had started a new monastery in Georgia. When he got out of the Marines, he went home to his family in Wisconsin and told them what was on his mind. They were Catholics, but they did not like the idea of his becoming a Trappist. They told him so with emphasis. His uncle offered him a forty-acre farm, ten head of milk cows, and a team if he would give up his foolish notion. The young man said no.

  His mother said, “If you go to that place in Georgia, I will never come to see you.”

  He went out of the house and started for Georgia.

  When he arrived, he found that most of the novices in the new frame monastery of pine planks had also left the armed forces to find a peace that could not exist outside a cloister.

  He knew that it was the same at the big Trappist monastery in Kentucky, Our Lady of Gethsemani. It was the same at the Trappist monastery in the Blackstone Valley of Rhode Island. It was the same at New Melleray, where the Trappists had settled almost a hundred years ago in the rolling cornfields outside Dubuque, Iowa. Soon there would be two more Trappist monasteries in the United States—one in the Wasatch mountains of Utah and another in the Pecos Valley, at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.

  Life in these monasteries is austere. In fact, when you compare it with the way people live in the world outside, the austerity is fantastic.

  Silence. The monks never hold conversations. They use sign language. They talk only to their superiors and to their confessors, which means that they hardly talk at all.

  Vigils. They get up in the middle of the night. When they do sleep, they do so not on inner spring mattresses but straw.

  Fasting. A shudder goes down the spine of the average American citizen when he learns that the monks never eat fried chicken or apple pie or beefsteak or hot dogs or hamburgers. In fact, they never eat meat, unless they are very ill. Fish is never served in the common refectory, nor eggs, except to the very old or the very young or the sick. They don’t even see milk and cheese for weeks at a time during half the year. They subsist on macaroni or sauerkraut or turnips or spinach or some other unappealing item.

  There is no point in multiplying the strange facts of Trappist asceticism without qualifying them, otherwise it will be hard for some people to understand the Trappists. The word “Trappist” has become synonymous with “ascetic” and definitely indicates a monk who leads a very hard life. But unless it is explained just why men lead that life and how they came to do it, there is not much point in simply saying that that is what they do.

  Penance and asceticism are not ends in themselves. If monks never succeed in being more than pious athletes, they do not fulfill their purpose in the Church. If you want to understand why the monks lead the life they do, you will have to ask, first of all, What is their aim?

  One purpose of this book is to answer that question and tell who the Trappists are and where they came from and what they think they are doing. This purpose is the more appropriate in view of one fact which surprises the Trappists almost as much as it surprises everybody else: the amazing growth of the Order in the last twenty years—especially its growth in America.

  If ever there was a country where men loved comfort, pleasure and material security, good health and conversation about the weather and the World Series and the Rose Bowl; if ever there was a land where silence made men nervous and prayer drove them crazy and penance scared them to death, it is America. Yet, quite suddenly, Americans—the healthiest, most normal, most energetic, and most optimistic of the younger generation of Americans—have taken it into their heads to run off to Trappist monasteries and get their heads shaved and put on robes and scapulars and work in the fields and pray half the night and sleep on straw and, in a word, become monks.

  When you ask them why they have done such things, they may give you a very clear answer or, perhaps, only a rather confused answer; but in either case the answer will amount to this: the Trappists are the most austere order they could find, and Trappist life was that which least resembled the life men lead in the towns and cities of our world. And there is something in their hearts that tells them they
cannot be happy in an atmosphere where people are looking for nothing but their own pleasure and advantage and comfort and success.

  They have not come to the monastery to escape from the realities of life but to find those realities: they have felt the terrible insufficiency of life in a civilization that is entirely dedicated to the pursuit of shadows.

  What is the use of living for things that you cannot hold on to, values that crumble in your hands as soon as you possess them, pleasures that turn sour before you have begun to taste them, and a peace that is constantly turning into war? Men have not become Trappists merely out of a hope for peace in the next world: something has told them, with unshakable conviction, that the next world begins in this world and that heaven can be theirs now, very truly, even though imperfectly, if they give their lives to the one activity which is the beatitude of heaven.

  That activity is love: the clean, unselfish love that does not live on what it gets but on what it gives; a love that increases by pouring itself out for others, that grows by self-sacrifice and becomes mighty by throwing itself away.

  But there is something very special about the love which is the beatitude of heaven: it makes us resemble God, because God Himself is love. Deus caritas est. The more we love Him as He loves us, the more we resemble Him; and the more we resemble Him, the more we come to know Him. And, to complete the circle, the more we know Him, the better we love Him, and “this is eternal life that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast sent.”1

  That is what is called the contemplative life: a life that is devoted before all else to the knowledge and love of God and to the love of other men in Him and for His sake. It is distinguished, therefore, from the active life, which is directly concerned with the physical and spiritual needs of men first of all. The one main concern of the contemplative is God and the love of God.