Providence (6 page)

Of course the actuality was nothing at all like this. The novices were rather like a special class at a school, and I was received by them like a new classmate. I was immediately assigned a guardian angel (literally so-called), a novice my own age, whose job was to see that I had everything I needed and got everywhere I needed to be. I remember this handsome and good-natured young man very vividly. I’m sure he must have been the prom king at his high school and the valedictorian and probably the captain of the football team.

Something I couldn’t possibly have anticipated happened: I was
accepted
by this group. I was welcomed and made to feel … worthy. I was completely bowled over by it. Nothing like this had ever happened to me. I wasn’t
on trial. I didn’t have to prove myself. Thinking about this now, I realize that for the first time since early childhood, I didn’t have to prove that I was a real boy or a real man. There was utterly no machismo here. Gethsemani wasn’t about manhood, it was about sainthood.

Decades later I realized that the silence saved me. I assume you know that, among the Trappists, you speak only to your spiritual director or confessor. There’s a rudimentary sign language—deliberately rudimentary—but this is for necessary communications, not for idle chitchat, at least in theory.

I say that silence saved me, because, growing up, from age ten to age twenty, language had been my weapon, virtually my only weapon. I wasn’t strong or fast or big, wasn’t physically aggressive, so I fought with my tongue. Made enemies with my tongue. This was all right too, because being shunned for viciousness is much easier to take than being shunned for queerness. But I walked into Gethsemani without a weapon of any kind, having denied myself speech. And, having denied myself speech, I was unable to make enemies—and, for the first time in a long, long time,
didn’t
make enemies.

People without much imagination will say things like, “Oh, it must have been terrible for someone as verbal as you not to be able to talk!” Believe me, it was
heavenly
not to be able to talk—to have no one
expect
you to talk. To be honest, I didn’t even much want to learn the sign language. I was perfectly content not to know what people around me were saying with their hands. It was none of my affair. If someone came up and told me the abbot
wanted to see me, that was fine, I could make that out, what more did I need?

Merton lent me a copy of Max Picard’s
The World of Silence,
a wonderful book, a whole book on silence, and nothing I could say in praise of silence could begin to equal it. Father Louis—that was Merton’s name in religion—was a marvelous person, full of humor and charm, not in the least austere or self-important or solemn. What my guardian angel was to me, Father Louis was to the novices as a group, and he brought us along rather like a good-natured football coach. Not all the novices were youngsters. Two were ordained priests from other orders, one in his thirties, the other in his forties. He treated the rest of us—the ten or twelve youngsters—the same way he treated them, as if we were grown-ups worthy of his respect. Obviously he knew things about the contemplative life that we didn’t know, couldn’t even begin to guess, but he was just there to enlighten us and that was that.

I was far from being the only one who had arrived with romantic fantasies. One day Father Louis said—we had classes with him every day—“Look, you’ve got to understand that what we have here is a very
ordinary
life.” Well, I think that drew a lot of smiles. Not many of us little saints were ready to believe that. He told us there were a lot of zombies walking around behind those beatific smiles we saw in the halls, and this certainly gave us something to think about, but no one imagined that something like that could ever happen to
us.

Of course, it was all new and exciting to us, but what
Father Louis wanted us to see was that it wasn’t always going to be new and exciting. It is, after all, a life of absolute regularity and unalterable, deadening routine, day after day, year after year, decade after decade—life utterly (and by design) without novelty. No vacations, no visits home, no days off, no cocktail hours, no parties, no scratch football games, no chess tournaments. In spite of that, a delightful merriment and glee flourished there that I’ve never encountered elsewhere. Holiness and reverence didn’t preclude gaiety and humor.

Lightheartedness. That’s what I found there: something almost unknown in today’s world, crushed under leaden burdens of crime, crisis, hatred, and anguish. You should see the letters I receive every week from despairing teenagers. Who can live with a light heart while participating in a global slaughter that makes the Nazi holocaust look like a limbering-up exercise? We look back in horror at the millions of Germans who knew more or less exactly what was happening in the death camps and wonder what kind of monsters those people were. In fifty years our grandchildren (if any survive) will look back at the
billions
of us who knowingly and wantonly laid the entire world to waste and wonder what kind of monsters
we
were.…

One day while I was out weeding a tomato patch, an old horse-drawn manure cart went lumbering by. The younger of the two novice-priests was standing on top of the load and throwing out magnificent two-handed kisses to the world, just the way the pope does in St. Peter’s Square. He was clowning, of course, but for whom? Not for us—I doubt if he knew anyone was watching and he
certainly didn’t care. He was clowning for God, displaying his thanks and his joy at being alive.

Was I happy there? Let’s hold off on that one for a while. All questions of that sort will be answered in their place.

I should point out that I wasn’t yet in the novitiate. I was a postulant—someone on probation, someone asking for admittance rather than someone admitted. That I was an outsider was plain from the fact that I still wore the clothes I’d arrived in.

As my spiritual director, Father Louis needed to know everything about me, and it wasn’t long before he unearthed my literary ambitions. He wanted to see some of my work, and I wrote out from memory a few of my poems—including, I’m sure, the one I read you a few minutes ago. He looked at them and said, “Well, that’s one thing settled: You’re a poet.”

From his point of view, this wasn’t something in my favor or something he saw as promising for my vocation. Just the opposite, in fact. As he had experienced it, the Trappist life was not congenial to the life of the mind. (I don’t remember his words; this is what I understood from his words.) From ancient tradition, the Trappists are an order of peasants and laborers just as the Benedictines are
an order of scholars and intellectuals. He told me very openly that he’d suffered in this environment—and wasn’t at all convinced that I should go through the same experience.

I’ll tell you something that may never have appeared in Merton’s published journals. There came a time when, after months of anguish, he told his confessor that he was struggling with a temptation to write his autobiography. If it isn’t already clear from what I’ve said, the writing of autobiographies is decidedly not on among the Trappists. But in this case, much to Father Louis’s surprise, his confessor
ordered
him to write it. Thus, suddenly, it was no longer a temptation to be resisted but rather an obligation to be fulfilled, and time previously spent in more ordinary work was now to be devoted to writing. This was how
The Seven Storey Mountain
came about.…

Why did he tell me this? I don’t know, I never wondered. I suppose it’s because he was one writer talking to another. It’s certainly something I would’ve done in his place.

S
IX

         
Readers of
Ishmael
often
assume that I must be a great lover of nature. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m a great lover of the world, which is something quite different. Nature is a figment of the Romantic imagination, and a very insidious figment at that. There simply is no such thing as nature—in the sense of a realm of being from which humans can distinguish themselves. It just doesn’t exist.

The nonhuman world? There’s no such thing as a nonhuman world—not here and now at any rate. The world that we have is the world that has humans in it, just as the world that we have is the world that has air and water and insects and birds and reptiles in it. Every aspect of the world was changed by our appearance in it three million
years ago, just as every aspect of the world was changed by the appearance of plant life three billion years ago. We’ve breathed in and out here for three million years, we’ve taken the substance of the world and made it into human flesh for three million years, and willy-nilly the world has taken that flesh back for three million years and redistributed it through the entire web of life on this planet.

Where would you draw a line between the human and nonhuman worlds? To which world does the wheat in our fields belong? If it belongs to the human world, what about the thousands of species that thrive in and around the wheat—and the tens of thousands of other species that thrive in and around them? It doesn’t even make sense to say that this house belongs to the human world. Carpenter ants and termites are making a meal of it as we speak, I can assure you of that, and it would be a miracle if there weren’t some moths in there snacking on our sweaters. The walls are inhabited by hundreds of different insects (most of which, thankfully, we never see), and funguses, molds, and bacteria flourish by the thousands on every surface.

No, it’s nonsense to try to find two worlds here that can be separated into human and nonhuman. Biological and philosophical nonsense.

I’m not only not a lover of what is commonly called nature, I’m not even a lover of the outdoors. You can’t see much of it right now, in the middle of the night, but there’s a regular jungle right outside those windows.
Make your way through that jungle for about twenty feet—more or less straight down—and you’ll come to a lovely little stream. I’m sure it’s lovely, though I’ve never seen it. I’ve never traveled those twenty feet, and I doubt if I ever will. I bless the stream and wish it well. I don’t need to see it to do that.

I give you this background so you can appreciate this fact: For my first three weeks at Gethsemani, I was kept inside. I mean I didn’t set a foot outside for even a moment—and was completely content not to set a foot outside. It was a constant round of chapel, classroom, refectory, chapel, cell, chapel, classroom, refectory, chapel, cell. The weather may have conspired in this, I don’t remember. I didn’t even notice that I’d been indoors for three weeks, wasn’t thinking about it at all, when one evening after we’d talked, Merton said, “I think it’s time you went outside.”

I stared at him blankly. I’d practically forgotten that there was such a thing as outside. Father Louis explained that the next morning he and the novices would be going out to perform various chores, and I could come along and gather kindling.

Go out and gather kindling? What a marvelous idea! I, the non-nature-lover and nonoutdoorsman, was suddenly enchanted by the prospect of standing out under the open sky and breathing in the chilly spring air. Suddenly I was sick to death of books and walls, stale air and electric
lights, hard floors and chairs. Suddenly I was overcome by a longing to hear wind in the trees, to see birds in the sky.

The next morning I woke up breathless, literally bursting with anticipation, though of course there were all sorts of things to get through first, like Mass and breakfast and our first class of the day. Finally, when the class was over, Father Louis came over and told me I could stay behind and read while he and the others went to change into work clothes. I’d be going out in my usual clothes, a sport coat and flannel trousers.…

Why didn’t I change as well? Well, let me see. How to explain it? I didn’t have any work clothes of my own to change into, and the others weren’t changing into jeans or overalls or anything like that, they were changing into Trappist work clothes. In other words, they were exchanging an indoor religious costume for an outdoor religious costume, and since I was still a postulant, I couldn’t join them in that.

Even so …? Yes, that’s an interesting question. Even if I wasn’t changing clothes, what was the point of my staying behind? It’s a good question. I guess the answer is that they had something else to do that didn’t require my presence, because I know that at least half an hour passed while I sat there with my book. I have no idea what I was reading. I doubt if I was doing much reading anyway. I was too excited.

Finally my guardian angel appeared. I started to get up out of my chair, but he signaled me to stay put.