Washington Post, 25 January 1999

Trappists: Religion in the Kentucky wilderness 

By Paul Hendrickson, The Washington Post 

TRAPPIST, Ky. -- Seven times a day they stop what they're doing -- whether sleep or study or manual labor -- to come back here, to this bare beautiful room, to pray the hours of the Divine Office. They're coming now, the monks of the Abbey of Gethsemani. 

It's as if they're flowing out of some vast medieval darkness. They're in their white Trappist robes and black-hooded scapulars cinctured at the waist with brown leather belts. Some have on leather sandals; some are in Nike athletic shoes. They've come from the cloistered areas of the monastery, where the world isn't allowed. 

Each dips his fingers in a font of holy water; traces the sign of the cross on his forehead and chest and tips of his shoulders; moves to the center aisle; bows toward the sanctuary and the Eucharist. There's so little sound, just soft rustling. 

It's not quite 3 a.m. Somewhere else bars are closing. Insomniacs must be channel-surfing. Maybe 30,000 feet straight up, a 747 is streaming for the coast. But on this knob of Kentucky earth, inside these consecrated walls, contemplative men, about 70 in number, have risen to volley God's praises across their choir stalls. 

"O Lord, open my lips," they begin. 

"And my mouth shall declare your praise." 

They did it yesterday. They did it last week. They will do it tomorrow. 

In a corner of the sanctuary, there's a lighted candle, and its glow is making a wavery pinpoint. 

Are they sleepy? Some must be. 

They have names like Joshua, Patrick, Timothy, Raphael, Alan. Some are priests, some are brothers. Their average age is 63. Some have been living the monastic life for decades. Some came here after walking pridefully in the world. Until June, when he died, there was a monk here who was 98. His name was Brother Kevin. Until a few years ago it had been a mark of his honor to get out the abbey mail every day. The entire monastery was pulling for Brother Kevin, born in 1900, to hymn God in the year 2000. 

All these men are part of a chain of prayer and community and steadfastness that stretches back nine centuries, which is when their Catholic penitential order -- the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance -- came into being, at a place called Citeaux, in the French wilderness, in 1098. 

This is the Kentucky wilderness, 1998. It's true, you can get here by car in about 90 minutes from downtown Louisville. It's true, the Abbey of Gethsemani operates a Web site (www.monks.org). 

A pretty sophisticated one, too, on which you can do shopping for Gethsemani Farms cheese, fruitcake, bourbon fudge. But that -- the lights of Louisville, home pages -- feels distant as the moon. 

"Lift up your hands to the holy place," they're chanting. 

"And bless the Lord through the night." 

This is the oldest Trappist monastery in the New World -- 150 years old this year, its sesquicentennial. (Trappists are a reform branch of the Cistercian order.) French monks arrived on this spot Dec. 21, 1848. They'd come because of their order's friendship with a French bishop named Flaget who was already in Kentucky and colonizing it to the faith. Those first Gethsemani Trappists, here 13 years before the Civil War, acquired their rolling pastureland and wooded hillside from nuns, the Sisters of Loretto. They built log huts, plowed fields. In time, they constructed their prayers of permanent stone. 

Eventually, the most revered and influential monk in the history of American Catholicism was to live and pray and struggle with his demons behind these walls. His name was Thomas Merton. He's been dead 30 years now. But Christians -- as well as those of other faiths and sometimes those of no faith at all -- make their way to this green rise off Route 247, below Bardstown, in central Kentucky. They're hoping to touch his ghost. They wish to see his grave, walk in the woods where he walked. 

Thomas Merton: that bohemian and poet and extreme sensualist, lover of jazz, prolific man, traveler of the new idea. A 20th-century prophet and mystic. Not a theologian so much as a kind of freelance spiritual thinker. Behind these walls, though, he was Father Louis. He'd taken that name, along with his Trappist vows and robes, to proclaim a new life, that he was dead to the secular world. But he wasn't, couldn't be. His mind was too hungry, uncaged. He was too plagued by his humanity. There was ever in him too much need for both deep solitude and the fellowship of man. He wanted stability, and he needed to roam. Among his combinations of contradictions was this essential one: "public monk." 

In a book called "The Seven Storey Mountain," published in 1948, considered one of the great spiritual autobiographies of the century, it took the author 372 pages to get to the part in his life story where he could write: "So Brother Matthew locked the gate behind me and I was enclosed in the four walls of my new freedom." And it wasn't true. 

"Go on then and educate me in pop music," he once wrote to a 16-year-old correspondent. "I don't know much about pop music. I am a confirmed jazzman, but I need to know more about pop also. Like some of those outfits you have out there that I hear such a lot about -- Grateful Dead and all that." 

Gethsemani was his home from December 1941, when he entered under the stone archway as a postulant, to December 1968, when he died -- not here but in Asia, attending an international religious conference, victim of a strange and accidental self-electrocution. It only added to the legend. 

He authored close to 60 books -- and was dead by 53. Another 30 or so books and 6,000 or so Merton pages have been posthumously published: articles, sermons, translations, journals, correspondence, meditations. How did he get all his writing done and still live the rigors of monkhood? 

While he was alive, some of his poetry appeared in The New Yorker and Partisan Review, and his collected poetic oeuvre (from New Directions Press) now contains more than 1,000 pages. His published journals run to seven volumes. There had been a hold on them for 25 years. The final installment has just come out. But it was Volume 6, published last year, in which a holy man told so openly and painfully and courageously of a woman half his age with whom he'd fallen in love, that astonished the world. Really, it shouldn't have. 

"What have I to do with all that has died, all that has belonged to a false life? What I remember most is me and M. hugging each other close for hours in long kisses and saying, 'Thank God this at least is real!' " he wrote in those journals -- and you hear the cry coming right off the printed page. 

Merton didn't end up leaving his priesthood and Trappist vocation in the summer of 1966, but for months his soul was on the rack as he tried to solve the great erotic riddle of his life and to reconcile himself to human love and God's. "Like Jonas himself I find myself traveling toward my destiny in the belly of a paradox," he wrote in a book called "The Sign of Jonas." But this was long before he'd met the student nurse at St. Joseph's Hospital in Louisville with the coils of coal-dark hair whose name was Margie. 

In a journal entry dated June 27, 1949 -- after he'd been a monk seven years, after he'd just been ordained a priest -the questing man wrote: "That is where the graces are for a Cistercian: in choir with the rest, at the common work, in Chapter, reading with the others. And what about me? I wonder more and more about the whole business. Most of the time my mind is in a jam. I make one movement to think about it and everything clogs and I remain helpless and thoughtless and open my hands and sit with my tongue-tied existence hanging on the inscrutable will of God." 

"The life of each one in this abbey is part of a mystery," Thomas Merton once wrote. "We all add up to something far beyond ourselves." 

Something else he wrote. He put it in a private letter to his abbot, on Passion Sunday 1954. The abbot of Gethsemani then was a man named Dom James Fox. He is dead now. It is important to know that nearly the whole time he was a monk, Father Louis struggled terribly with Dom James over issues of obedience and control. Theirs was a hugely complicated father-son relationship. But the monk, who was so famous by then, wrote this letter, which until now has never been published. It was found by a reporter in the abbey archives: 

"I am beginning to face some facts about myself. Yes, need for more of a life of prayer, greater fidelity, greater sincerity and simplicity in doing what God wants of me. Easy to say all that. It depends on getting rid of something very deep and very fundamental in myself. ... Continual, uninterrupted resentment. I resent and even hate Gethsemani. I fight against the place constantly. I do not openly allow myself -- not consciously -- to sin in this regard. But I am in the habit of letting my resentment find every possible outlet and it is such a habit. ... I am not kidding about how deep it is. It is DEEP." 

Wasn't he only proving again his humanity? 

To study pictures of Merton in the last few years of his life, in and out of Trappist garb, to listen to audiotapes of his sermons, is to be intrigued by a stolid, grinning monk who seemed to have a peasant's back and huge forearms. There was his high-timbred voice. There were his small feet and short legs. Work clothes appeared to fit him terribly. One of the monks who live at Gethsemani, Father Matthew Kelty, has said that "you could tell Father Louis by his walk. He had a rather rapid walk, but not altogether measured and orderly." Yes, it must have been a kind of window on all that was roiling inside. 

But the most intriguing thing in the pictures of Merton in those last few years of his life is his mouth. It is so sensual-seeming. It's as though it wants to work constantly. New York publisher James Laughlin, who was Merton's close friend, and who's now deceased, has written of how he'd come to Gethsemani to visit the monk and would get the abbot's permission to take him outside the gates. Merton would properly leave the grounds in a clerical suit, carrying a satchel that presumably contained books of prayer. They'd get a few miles off the property and Merton would instruct Laughlin to stop the car. He'd run into the woods and emerge in Levi's and leather. Then they'd spend all day in country bars, with Merton buying everybody beers and talking nonstop. The man was such a prodigious drinker -- usually of wine, but whatever else he could get. 

On his 50th birthday Merton wrote in his journals how he had always used love badly in his early life. He'd taken advantage of women sexually. He was ashamed. 

In March 1966, the monk went to Louisville for a back operation. He'd been living in a small hermitage on the monastery grounds, having gotten permission from Dom James Fox to move out of the abbey's main buildings. He wanted more solitude. 

The nurse-in-training came in to rub his back, give him a sponge bath. It was a kind of coup de foudre, as someone said: "love at first conversation." 

He fought it, he embraced it. "There is no question that I am in deep," he wrote on April 27. The next day in his journals: "If I believe in love and in M., am I willing to face all the consequences frankly and despise the ridicule, the criticism and the injury without in any way cheaply giving in?" 

Back in his hermitage, he is writing secret letters, he is going to rooms in the abbey to make furtive calls to her. He is conscripting friends to come to the monastery and drive him to Louisville on false pretenses. He is loathing himself. He cannot stop. He is beginning to wonder if somehow this isn't in God's plan for him. You get the sense of a man who wishes to be caught. And who has a compulsion to write it all down. 

On May 12, 1966: "The only thing to do is to take all of it with a good heart and not fear the pain that must come with it." 

A few days later: "What I wrote yesterday was in large part a shameful evasion." Ten days later: "We got ourselves quite aroused sexually last Thursday and since then I have suffered a great deal of confusion, anguish, indecision, and nerves." Three weeks later: "I wonder what all my reasonings and resolutions amount to!" By the end of the summer, when it has started to cool -- not what he feels for her, but the eroticism of it: "Was I being faithful in an obscure way to some other and more inscrutable call that was from God? Somehow I can't help believing that I was." He is coming to a realization that he is a monk in love who cannot leave his vows. Most of all he realizes how human he has been acting. To be human is to do some sublime and stupid things -- sometimes simultaneously. "I see that I am floundering around in the dark, and need to pray and meditate a great deal. And that it is true that this summer I have done some very foolish and dangerous things." 

At an earlier point, his phone calls having been discovered and reported to the abbot, he had faced Dom James -- with whom he had so many struggles -- and confessed everything. A year later, still loving her so deeply, still wishing to do what God wants of him, he writes of "a real sense of being flawed and of needing immense help, pardon -- to recover some capacity to love God." He is both grateful and chastised, proud and humiliated. 

Margie Smith went back to Ohio and married a doctor and raised sons. In all these years she has never once spoken publicly of Merton. Even Michael Mott, the authorized biographer, with access to all the Merton papers, with his prodigious research, never met her. (They spoke on the phone.) She has painted, she has taken advanced studies in nursing, she has kept up with the Louisville friends who were close to Merton. She has declined to become part of a culture in America that would reward somebody with millions for writing a book titled "I Was Thomas Merton's Secret Love." 

In the fall of 1968 he left on a roundabout trip for Asia. Merton visited other monasteries in America, and there was much speculation, even in the secular press, that he might leave Gethsemani. He needed more solitude, he often said. He had brought the whole world to his doorstep, in a way. Jacques Maritain had come to Kentucky to see him. And Joan Baez. And Daniel Berrigan. He was spiritually and intellectually restless. 

Was he actually going to leave Gethsemani for another monastery? The answer died with him. 

A Bangkok conference brought together monks from East and West. On Dec. 10, Merton gave one of the principal addresses, although he didn't give it especially well, nor did it go over so pleasingly. He spoke on Marxism and monasticism. He seemed distracted, weary. He sort of trailed off at the end and said he'd just "disappear." He went back to his room -- and that is where they found him several hours later, on a terrazzo floor, with a standing fan diagonally across his body and a huge brown streak halfway up his side. Apparently, he had stepped from a shower and had come in contact with a faulty electrical cord. He was dead 27 years to the day he had entered monastic life. 

The head of the Benedictine Order, Rembert Weakland, who was presiding at the conference, gave him absolution. 

There were bizarre rumors and theories of suicide, of CIA involvement. 

They brought him home, here, to a place called Gethsemani, named for agonies. They buried him in the monastery churchyard, under a red cedar: a small white cross, amid the rows of other small white Trappist crosses: Father Louis Merton. 

"There is no easy way out of love," he once wrote in the journals. He was talking about Margie Smith, but he must have been talking about God's love as well. All you can do is try to be honest and to follow, even -- or especially -- in your madness. Because God is known to write straight, but with crooked lines. 

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