The Monastic Life

Any book by Thomas Merton is worth reading; for even his flimsiest comments bear some relation to the gravity of purpose and penetration below the moral surfaces which led him to a successful vocation as a Trappist monk in the Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky. Yet it is, to say the least, peculiar that a member of a silent Order should become a prominent exponent of monastic life to laymen, and even assume a prophetic role, as a modern John the Baptist calling an Atomic Age to repentance. Only Merton’s utter sincerity and rock- bottom monastic obedience saves him from the brand of showmanship; but it does save him, where many evangelists stumble.

This Secular Journal covers the years between 1939 and 1941, after the author’s reception into the Catholic Church and before his entering the Cistercian order. It is a curiously weightless document, a thing of bits and pieces, unpretentious, and most illuminating where it is least personal: ‘Tribulation detaches us from the things that are really valueless, because their attraction cannot stand up under it, and all satisfactions that are meaningless appear as such when we are filled with tribulation. Therefore we should be grateful for it’.

The man who has such thoughts is a proto-monk already. Only a monk’s vocation could satisfy a soul that continually sees through illusion to the bone. Merton is an exile in New York and Cuba; he hangs his harp on a tree by the waters of Babylon. Only in Harlem does he find (outside Gethsemani) some shadow of the simplicity and charity he is hungry for. How many with the same hunger move from job to job, liaison to liaison, or wait like ghosts in the psychiatrist’s anteroom? This sad little book has a happy ending – that one man searched for an actual cure, found it, and did not let it go.

1959 (191)