Why We Still Need Monasteries
In the midst of the holiday bustle, I received the gift of a pause. It came in the form of an invitation from my friend and co-author on two books, Brother Paul Quenon, who invited me to a long weekend at his Trappist monastery, the Abbey of Gethsemani outside of Louisville.
The occasion was the installation of a wagon wheel at the foot of a wooden cross beside Thomas Merton’s hermitage on the abbey’s grounds. Merton saw the wheel and the cross as a symbol of unity and a reflection of Christ’s call for love and mercy. Over decades, the first two wagon wheels placed there had disintegrated and the cross stood alone for several years.
Visiting the abbey last summer, Carol and Gary Lenox of North Carolina noticed the wheel’s absence, though it is present in many photos of the hermitage dating from the 1960s. Gary, a professional auctioneer, decided to search for a suitable replacement. He found one owned previously by a man, interestingly enough, named Tom Loving.
The wheel had been painted red and Gary spent hours lovingly sanding and staining it so it would match the wood of the cross. Brother Paul chose the weekend of Dec. 10, the date on which Merton died in 1968, to hold the installation.
My visit to Gethsemani came at just the right moment. For weeks I had been feeling restless, inattentive to my prayer life and generally scattered in focus. To give you an idea of my state of mind, I wrote a poem just before leaving for the abbey that began, “Discontent lives in this house.”
As soon as I entered the silence of the monastery, I had the sense of coming home, not only to a place, but to myself. The abbey bells toll the hours for prayer eight times during the day, but visitors experience a different sense of time - one that is more attuned to the present moment. Each time the bells called us to prayer, I thought of the breath mantra Thich Nhat Hanh taught his students to repeat when walking, “Present moment, wonderful moment.”
You really can’t go to a place like Gethsemani and expect to follow a rigid plan. There are too many chance encounters. Someone you meet on a path wants to recite for you a David Whyte poem. Someone at breakfast has a story to tell about how they found Gethsemani and it found them. So you stop, you listen.
Perhaps it is hearing the monks chant the words, but Psalms with which I am well familiar have more meaning and potency when I am at Gethsemani, like these lines from Psalm 18: “The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer/ my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge.
As I gazed at the moon and stars in the vast night sky away from city lights, I felt like the psalmist who wrote, When I consider your heavens /the work of your fingers /the moon and the stars/ which you have set in place/ what is mankind that you are mindful of them/ human beings that you care for them?
I always try to attend Vigils, the first prayers of the day when the monks gather at 3:15, long before dawn. There is something comforting in knowing that while most of the rest of the country is still asleep, a group of monks are awake, singing their hearts out and praying for this fragile and fragmented world. It never ceases to amaze me that I can rise to attend Vigils in the middle of the night and somehow not feel exhausted the rest of the day. Instead, it’s envigorating.
Compline at 7:30 p.m. ends the monastic day. It is my other favorite prayer time. The Compline psalms are filled with words of comfort. I particularly love “The Song of Simeon” that comes at the end of Compline:
Lord save us! Save us while we are awake, protect us while we are asleep, that we may keep our watch with Christ, and when we sleep, rest in his peace.
Sometimes when I am at home and can’t fall asleep I sing the words to myself to ease my restlessness.
Compline ends with the abbot sprinkling holy water on the monks and monastery guests as they go off to bed. I wish I could experience at home the peace I feel at the end of a day at the abbey.
On this particular visit, we were joined by the beautiful singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer, whom Brother Paul had invited after Carrie interviewed he and I for her podcast “The Growing Edge,” co-hosted with her friend, the spirituality author Parker Palmer. We spent two magical evenings at Merton’s hermitage in the woods, where Brother Paul, Father Lawrence, Brother Abel, Carol, Gary, Carrie and I each shared poems we had written.
Carrie sang some new songs she composed with a colleague, based on passages in Merton’s writings. The refrain of one of the songs was Merton’s recommendation to take more time, cover less ground. Just the message I needed to hear.
The hermitage is so remote and the darkness surrounding it is so thick that it is easy to see why Merton felt increasing dependent on the mercy of God. To experience that darkness must be like what the infant feels wrapped in its mother’s womb.
It is tempting to dismiss monasteries as hopeless throwbacks to the past, but there will always be a need for monasteries. Human beings in every age yearn for moments of silence and solitude. We need places where prayer is the main form of activity.
At Vigils one morning, Father Michael read this passage from the writings of Christian de Chergé, the abbot who was kidnapped at his monastery in Algeria with six of his brother monks in 1996 and later killed along with them. Comparing monastic solitude to the desert, de Chergé wrote:
“[It is to] the desert we must constantly return in order to sustain the specific fruitfulness of our lives in the here and now.”
As we head into a new year, perhaps we can search for the monastery nearest to us and carve out time to spend there, taking a pause, seeking peace, and returning to ourselves.
