(Or: How I Unwittingly Prepared for Social Distancing)
“I am what I live. Don’t tell me who I am yet. It is still being spelled out.”
– Brother Paul Quenon
Fifty-two miles south of Louisville, among rolling hills of switchgrass and swaths of cut corn stalks and stands of uncut red oak and dogwood, near a three-way intersection of shoulderless, asphalt roads, sits a small, red-brick house. There is a grain silo nearby, and a faded turquoise water tower and an idle combine harvester in a fallow field across the way, and occasional, speed-limit minding traffic driving through cool late-February air so thin of humidity the birds fly and chirp in unmuddled joy. It is a scene ubiquitous in this part of America, in this time of year, these rural bucolic settings of west Appalachia so fungible a blindfolded local from six states around could not, with blindfold removed, positively identify his location.
Until: a mile to the north – along Monks Road – after a shallow bend to the east, down a small decline, and through the touchdown goalposts of a cross to the west side of the road and an elevated statue of Joseph and Jesus to the east, rises the sprawling, muted white, neo-Gothic compound of Gethsemani Abbey.
Ten years ago I read The Seven Storey Mountain, the monk and author Thomas Merton’s autobiography about his physical path from Europe to the United States and back again, twice, eventually ending up at Columbia University as a 21 year old sophomore, and his spiritual path from vice-loving atheist to Trappist monk to envoy for global humanism. Merton lived devoutly, not just in his Catholicism but in his attempts to find clarity in life and thought; despite living much of his life as a monk, and the latter part as a hermit (though not a very good one), he was a man constantly on the move. He delved philosophically into many things – I presume a monk has plenty of time on his hands – and was a man for his time, his writings and social commentary from the halls of an abbey in central Kentucky about the global issues of war and race and non-violence clarion call for two generations of men looking for clarity as to what America was giving them. Or, perhaps more importantly, what it was asking of them.
Merton’s popularity as a writer, philosopher, and social critic resulted in droves of young men turning to Catholic monasteries in the post-World War II years as well as during and after Vietnam, but Merton’s own brand of religion might be summed up, ironically, in what he described as his naïve beliefs as a young man: that all religions “lead to God, only in different ways, and every man should go according to his own conscience, and settle things according to his own private way of looking at things.” Merton dedicated much of his life to Catholicism as the path to God, but his philosophy and intellectual curiosity, along with his late-in-life exaltation of Buddhism (he died, alas, courtesy of shady Thai insulation, suffering a fatal post-shower electric shock from a ceiling fan in a multi-faith retreat center outside Bangkok) intrigued me as evidence that his early beliefs were maybe the more accurate. As Buddha suggests, sort out your own salvation with diligence.
Seven Storey Mountain didn’t move me enough to return to Catholicism, though to be fair “return” is a bit of a stretch. I often embellish the intellectual path to my contemporary agnosticism by explaining that I was “raised Catholic,” as if my childhood piety were interchangeable with “to do the right thing,” or “by wolves”, but to be honest my Catholic exposure was mostly isolated to the short time periods around my baptism (SUPER young. Like, a baby. And I didn’t get a vote); First Communion, around the age of seven, where I received the blood and body of Jesus Christ (ew. And again, no vote); and CCD on Wednesdays during the seventh and eighth grade (where I first exercised my right to vote by stopping attending). Perhaps the most enduring of Catholic canonical law came courtesy of my grandmother, who assured me that my tongue would turn black if I lied, or, upon a slight injury like a stubbed toe, declared that God was punishing me for some moral infraction I committed at an earlier date. Or would commit later, or was perhaps simply just thinking of committing, even if I didn’t yet know when. That God is ever ready to balance the ledger by slamming my shin into my bed frame has proven far more practical than Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus.
What did intrigue me was this idea of going to a monastery. Of dropping out of society (or at least intentionally inserting yourself into a very different one) in order to contemplate some higher ideal. To read. To write. To wear a robe and Birkenstocks and take long walks, perhaps with my sleeved hands clasped casually behind my back, a precocious speckled fawn close upon my heel or a cartoon bird on my shoulder. To hum a Gregorian chant or two. Mostly, to just be quiet for a while.
Entering a monastery presents some practical decisions, the figurative shedding of skin and literal shedding of friends, family, worldly possessions, and even your name notwithstanding. Where to find a monastery, for starters, and then which order to choose. You might be familiar with the Jesuits, they of Georgetown and St. Joseph’s and Boston College fame (and twenty-four other major universities), or the perhaps less famous Franciscans (Felician University, anyone?) or even the Benedictines. But how about the Dominicans? Or the Carmelites? The Premonstratensians? Or the Cistercians, Carthusians, Passionists, Visitationists? The Friars Minor Capuchin? Or the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration?1One website lists more than 300 different orders and congregations, from the simple and descriptive “Grey Nuns” (no doubt an early example of reappropriation, old nuns taking the young nuns’ slur and claiming it as their own, “you know what, you…you brunette. We are grey and we’re going to start our own thing”) to the sanguinary “Adorers of the Blood of Christ” to the very specific “Camaldolese Hermits of the Congregation of Monte Corona” to the optimistic “Sisters of Jesus, Our Hope,” a name I imagine was settled upon only after a lengthy debate as to whether they shouldn’t end with an exclamation point, and whose recruitment material includes the assertion that they “live vows of poverty, chastity and obedience within a vibrant community life.” Hopeful indeed. Anyone? The names start to delve into the impossible, adorers of blood and regret and sorrow and other emotions, unlimited by the restrictions of time and space, spawning the unavoidable satiricals like Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption2http://www.ourladyofperpetualexemption.com/ or the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.3https://www.thesisters.org/ Choosing the correct monastery can’t be a decision one takes lightly. And we are all human, so rivalries and jealousies surely emerge. If I choose the Benedictines, will the Franciscans forever look down upon me? Do I look better in grey or black (no one looks good in brown)? Are there dedication rankings, one order taking their vows more seriously, one more forgiving in their dress (you can wear jeans here brother, he said unironically), another more collegial? I once heard an Army general tell an Air Force officer that his career choice was “a fine alternative to military service” – do the monasteries have an equivalent? Will the Opus Deis and Brothers of Mortification of the Flesh4I made that one up. tighten a figurative cilice or whip a condescending discipline in my direction should I choose a more, eh, cool denomination?5“They are doing so as you write this”, says my grandmother from her grave. “Watch yourself mister.”
The choice was made for me, my selection of Gethsemani Abbey sealed when I read Seven Storey Mountain, and after a stop at Wal-Mart (bananas and energy bars), Hobby Lobby (pens and butcher paper), and Target (yoga mat and yeah, I know), I drive the 30 or so more miles towards Gethsemani, past an empty log cabin that falsely purports to be President Lincoln’s boyhood home, then into the town of New Haven (population 891), on whose outskirts I spy my first Confederate flag of the day,6There is a brute inside of me who fantasizes about mandating that every home that sports a Confederate flag must also hang an oil portrait of Abraham Lincoln near their doorway, and look him in the eye each morning upon leaving their home, and thank him for letting them live in America. This is not a good thought to have prior to spending time at a monastery. then beyond that through the aforementioned three-way intersection and then into the parking lot of the Abbey. It is mostly full, late-model cars and designer trucks and even a Tesla, but it is tranquil, and the few other people standing around the cars are quiet. I carry my luggage instead of wheeling it behind me and follow two hipsters also checking in, they with matching puffy jackets over flannel shirts and matching thick brown belts holding up their crisp Levi’s and sporting matching short hair and beards and glasses and matching weathered (one faux, one not) brown boots, a hipster uniform.7Moment of self-reflection: Is this me? Is this what I’ve become? Just another truth-seeking, back-to-when-life-was-cool hipster, destined to make my own shoes and use locally-sourced beard oil? Is this me? No. But mostly because I do not wear jeans. One guy has two drumsticks (wood, not chicken) protruding from his satchel, and I imagine him in his room air-drumming all weekend, a silent one-man one-father one-son one-Holy Ghost drum circle.8I like your cymbal Jesus! Or is that your nimbus?
The monk behind the counter is old and stooped and hoarse, gravity working its magic on spinal and vocal cords alike; he asks me if I’ve been here before, and where I’m coming from, and did I drive? He mischievously shames me for flying and then driving just from Nashville rather than all the way from Seattle, as if I’ve cheapened my experience already, and then spends what seems to be an inordinate amount of time deciding in which of the several vacant rooms to place me. He hovers over his ultimate selection – room 310 – long enough that I think he has momentarily fallen asleep, but then he pencils my name into the register in neat, uniform block letters, hands me my keys while I listen intently to his directions, and then at 4:35 p.m. on a Friday, after speaking what I hope will be my last words until Monday morning – “thank you” – I turn and ascend the stairs.
Thomas Merton was born in France in 1915 of an American mother and a Kiwi father. They died when he was six and sixteen, respectively, and he grew up in France, England, and the U.S., raised by his father and then an uncle. He was a smart young man, though hypersensitive, it seems, to emotion and unfairness and was afflicted (and concerned) by some extremities in his own personality. He smoked packs of cigarettes a day, drank profusely, spent time in jail, talked into the early morning hours with his university pals at both Cambridge and then later Columbia, loved women – he most likely fathered a child to whom he never spoke or acknowledged – and in general fully partook of life in the 1930s. Had he not died by electrocution, wrote a New Yorker article in 2018, “he might have died by overstimulation.”9Jacobs, Alan, “Thomas Merton, The Monk Who Became a Prophet,” The New Yorker, December 28, 2018. Merton arrived in the U.S. for the last time in 1935, enrolled at Columbia, and was eventually thunderstruck by Catholicism. He entered the church in 1939, immediately began exploring the priesthood, and after opening a Bible – in Latin, of course – to a random page, he found his finger falling on a portent: “And behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things take place.”10Gospel of Luke 1:20. A monastery it would be.
Merton visited Gethsemani Abbey in April of 1940 and returned for good in December of 1941. And whatever Merton was looking for, I think I might be looking for it too, but in the obverse, not for a life permanently slowed, or one clarified by the regimented liturgical process of centuries of rigor and tradition and obfuscation, but a simple reset, a restart, a regeneration, a re-anything that might re-mind me of what once was, that time and place where I felt indomitable, and in a flow, as if in every moment lie the potential of something amazing about to happen. To find those things hiding the true meaning of other things, a stripping away of the things we know are unimportant, or those things we think are important but really aren’t but have somehow allowed them to dominate our daily existence. Perhaps just a continuing assessment of whether Maslow was full of shit. That would do too.
Room 310 is on the west side of the dormitory and down the length of a hallway covered in blue commercial-grade carpet, the last door before a set of large windows. I get a small shock as I insert my key into the lock, as I do each time I unlock my door over the next three days, surely my grandmother sitting at the foot of God, casting tiny thunderbolts in my direction, reminding me both to be on my best behavior and also who is in charge in the unlikely event I’ve forgotten, God no doubt now wondering the same thing.
The room is austere, but frankly much more accommodating than one might expect of a monastery. There is an open closet, a nightstand, an armchair, and a single bed with a bedspread that might be cut from the same heavy textile as the hallway carpet. There is a crucifix on one wall, with a desk and desk chair under it, and two pictures on another (stations of the cross, I think confidently, grateful there is no schooled Catholic nearby to tell me otherwise or conduits through which my grandmother might shock me), and on the bed are a folded towel and washcloth and a roll of toilet paper. I unpack, and breathe deeply, and close my eyes, and frankly feel just a tiny bit emotional because, for the first time in a very long time, I feel like I am doing something. Not “doing something”, but something. Checking a box, fulfilling a promise, lining out a list, exercising dominion over myself and how I spend my time and how I exert my energy and reminding myself that I once said I was going to do something and right now, right here in this old building in the middle of Kentucky occupied by men who, years ago, decided they were going to do something – I am doing something too.
I sit down at the desk and read through the daily retreat schedule, the words familiar – Vigils and Lauds and Terces – even if their specific meanings are not. In the top drawer I find a red folder stuffed with notes from the occupiers of Room 310 before me (“pilgrims,” some of my predecessors call us), and now the monk’s attentiveness to my room assignment makes sense.11I learn later that retreatants don’t leave notes in every room, and that the red folder in 310 must occasionally be emptied of old ones to make room for the new. The dates range from early 2014 to just two weeks ago, from a concise yellow-sticky don’t give up, peace will come to you to a six-page missive describing the writer’s every day at Gethsemani. Some are monotonous and boring, a few tragic, some meandering and uncertain; most are nearly-uniform tales of a search for some sort of internal quiet, notes written on postcards and grade school ruled paper and personal stationery, some in tiny, all-capped letters, others in soaring, beautiful cursive or written in thick fuchsia ink so thick it bleeds through the paper so I can’t read the other side.12I am momentarily derailed by the number of “over!” or “other side” – sometimes accompanied by a rightward pointing arrow – written on the bottoms of these small notes, as if paper were so multi-dimensional that lack of directions at the end of a clearly incomplete note would leave me searching about the room, overturning furniture and rifling through drawers and looking under rugs for the remainder of the note, occasionally stopping in the middle of the room, one arm folded across my chest and the other holding my chin in perplexion of where, oh where could the rest of that note possibly be? until a cartoon bulb lights above my head and I snap my fingers in realization: LOOK ON THE OTHER SIDE. I read only a few, planning on pacing myself over the next two and a half days, and I resist the urge to immediately organize the notes into chronological order (sub-urge resisted: oldest to newest, or newest to oldest). I find, however, an OCD comrade-in-arms, NP from Parnell, Tennessee, who gives me permission; she rearranged them on September 7, 2016, and there are so many retreatants between her and me who are obviously heathens.
Dinner is served promptly at six p.m. My first meal is what appears to be leftover grilled cheese sandwich halves and broccoli and mushroom soup and a dessert of Jell-O. There are fifteen to twenty other people here in line, mostly men, one of whom asks, out loud, for sugar, and just like that my Totally Ridiculous in Hindsight Plan B: No Human Voices is gone (Plan A was for total silence, which was just a silly expectation on its face. At even the quietest times I could hear the dull thrumming of my heartbeat in my ears, let alone the church bells and road traffic and birds and wind and other humans saying offensive things to me like “hi” or “good morning”). Plan C, then, is reserved for me and is within my control, which is to just be as quiet as possible, both within my head and outside of it. And so I try. I pick my feet up when I walk. I pull my chair out with two hands, lifting it instead of dragging it across the floor. I pick up a fork, then a knife, then a spoon, one at a time so they don’t clink against one another. I sip my tea and chew and swallow and breathe like I’m getting stalked, like I possess the Secret to the Universe to be stolen from me should I make a noise and disclose my location. The phone and computer are already off, of course, and will not be powered up again until Monday morning (if ever!), and I Peaceful Warrior and Downward Dog rather than blaze through push-ups and sit-ups; I turn the pages of my books methodically and slowly; I curse the reading light for its hum. I find myself doing things with deliberation and intention, a slowing down of my motions, walking quieter, breathing quieter, turning pages quieter, pushing down the toaster with precision, feeling the catch rather than bludgeoning it into submission. I have less of a death grip on my pen, the vanity of the cursive of my youth returning over the hours as I write this that you are reading, or scrawl out a list of things to Google at a later date.13Who was with Buddha when he invited Mara in for tea?; who wrote “All-American Despair”; E.O. Wilson; is Jesus always looking in the same direction when depicted on the cross?; Viaticum; Samadhi; phrase “get up on the wrong side of the bed’; Midrashic; Goliards; do nomadic cultures have a lot children, and who can I blame for overpopulation?; Détraqué; Law of Polarity; difference between an abbey and a monastery; sub question: Do people have sex during silent retreats at abbeys?; sub sub question: If so, do they feel guilty afterwards?; learn the de Profundis; sub-task: learn te deum; Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican; why is there a w in wrist? wrong. wrestle. wren.; origin of the phrase “to square a circle.”; do x-rays detect water?; Fred Swaniker; Michael Emerson / North Park Univ.; origin of phrase to “go South”; any difference between a knob and a peak?; “tal vez me puedes ayudar” – correct?; Polonnaruwa; Demoniac; why did Sodom take all the heat? Can’t we commit gomorrahy? Or gomorrahize someone?; Franciscans v Ignatians v Benedictines v Dominicans; what’s with Jesus cursing the fig tree?; fleshpot; in spite v despite.,14I know you’re not interested. But if you’re curious: Ananda; Stephen Rodrick; the world’s leading authority on ants; no, but down and to the right is definitely prevalent at Gethsemani; the Eucharist when given to a person near death; a state of intense concentration achieved through meditation; the Romans, highly superstitious, believed that one should always start the day by getting up on the right side of the bed, and getting up on the left side – the wrong side – portended a bad day ahead; Jewish methods of interpreting biblical text; a group of young clergy who wrote satirical poetry; no. Probably pre-Industrial Age agrarians; an insane or psychopathic person; everything is dual!; though it’s certainly debatable, a monastery is the premature version of an abbey; I’m guessing yes; for sure if they’re Catholic; basically, Psalm 130; I shall add it to the list; the parable suggests humble prayer, alas, “publican” here is a tax collector, and not, unfortunately, a pub owner; “wrist,” like many other “wr” words (wrestle, wrap, wrinkle…) used to be pronounced with the “w”. The 17th century left the sound behind, and we’re still waiting to drop the actual letter; it’s a geometry problem – turning a circle into a square in a limited number of steps – doubling as a metaphor for the impossible; no; a guy from Ghana doing some really, really cool shit; a guy from America doing some really, really cool shit; though it may have to do with western notions of directions and symbology and degradation (south is always towards the bottom on western maps, which is the same direction as a plunging stock market graph), some Native American tribes used the same term to describe death or dying; yes! A knob is a peak or hill having the shape of a knob (though the University of Kentucky, for what it’s worth, calls a knob “erosion remnants” of an upland area – there’s even a “Knobs Region” of Kentucky (as opposed to the “Bluegrass Region” or the “Pennyroyal”)), a peak is the high point of a mountain or a ridge; not really, though it would probably get you by; the second-oldest of Sri Lanka’s kingdoms; one possessed by the devil; the curse, I assume, of being second. No one really talks about St. Paul either; this distinction is simply too long to discuss here, but know there are at least 39 orders and hundreds of congregations; this, like much of what Jesus said, is open to interpretation. Maybe he was just hangry; places that offer “luxurious or / and unrestrained pleasure or amusement,” or what my grandmother called those she perceived as hussies; use them interchangeably (just no “of” after “despite” please).
But the world is a noisy place, and the previously overlooked or ignored are magnified by the silence. Silverware, a heater, a microwave, a faucet, spreading butter on toast, sliding out chairs, chewing, drinking, throat-clearing, swallowing, zipping, ice in glasses, automatic paper towel dispensers, an elevator bell, a church bell, an alarm bell, breathing, sneezing, coughing, snot-rocketing, farting, burping…a flushing toilet sounds like a jet engine; rolling luggage industrial machinery; flitting warbler a forest monster of Grimmian proportions. But here’s the thing: it’s good. Like really good. And it’s infectious. I read, I write, I sit and listen to birds. Or the air. Or nothing. I walk in the woods, avoiding eye contact with the occasional other human being, lest my social contract with the world obligate me to say “hello” or “good morning”, instead offering my best attempts at, but clearly fake, Duchennes smiles with a quick, nose in the air ‘sup bro, I acknowledge you but I refuse to do so overtly head nod. And I did all this in silence. Or at least according to Plan C.15To be fair, I broke Plan C three times: The first time a quite involuntarily “hey little birds!” spoken to, surprise, little birds I felt were accompanying me on a walk. I caught myself mid “little,” quietly both toning down and tailing off the “birds” part, a clear moment of shame. The second was while looking out my fourth floor window at the garden below, a big Kentucky coffee tree (gymnocladus dioicus) center and something cypressy and equally big to the right. An American crow (corvus brachyrhynchos) landed at the feeder near the wall, forcing all the other birds to fly away, drawing my eye immediately to the coffee tree in front of me where a brilliantly red-headed Red-Headed Woodpecker (melanerpes erythrocephalus) hopped up the trunk, quickly, high enough to draw my eye to a Great Blue Heron (ardea herodias) flying slowly, dramatically, just across the tops of the trees, an Ukiyo-e woodblock in motion, the ridiculousness of the five-second sequence of events prompting me to whisper, “what in the world.” And the third: During a long walk, after I spit on my arm, prompting me to call myself a name I am embarrassed to repeat. And for about two days, free of the detritus of life in 2020-America, free of Instagram likes and Facebook followers and fake news-peddlers and fake news-accusers and fake-news consumers and Buzzfeed clickbait16“30 BuzzFeed Headline Tips You Need to See to Believe” is a real thing. and Phantom Vibration Syndrome17No, you’re not crazy. Your thigh or butt vibrating despite nothing there is also a real thing. and free of a TV or Netflix or a lap top or a cell phone or even a watch was, for me – and can be for you, too – a real path, to be trite, to freeing my mind. To quote George Clinton and the Parliament Funkadelic (and definitely not En Vogue) who was quoting Junior from Platoon, who was most likely paraphrasing Emmanuel Kant who was probably riffing on David Hume who surely borrowed from Plato who, we can all agree, probably stole everything from Socrates: free your mind and your ass will follow.18And after all that, Buddha probably said it first. So I freed my mind. And my ass followed. And it was good.19For the discerning reader: yes, I edited Moses. Using “very” in the sentence “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Gen. 1:31) weakens “good,” especially because the doer here is God. Is God capable of just normal good? As in, “that’s a good first try God! Now let’s see if we can do better.” No, he is not. God knows only “very good,” so using “very” is Moses just trying to pad his word count. Or so would say Mrs. DeGiacomo.
It is Sunday night, my last night at the Abbey, my last
night of Plan C. I can already feel focus drifting away, partially because I
have spent a weekend reading and writing and most definitely not clock
watching, and now I must get back to the real world, and I have a day to plan
and a rental car to return and a plane to catch. I imagine writing a fake Airbnb review from someone who didn’t know
what they were getting into (“incessant ringing of bells, guests unfriendly and
hotel staff either nowhere to be seen or all together at once, boring church
attached to the hotel – not ONE picture of Jesus!”), think about the proper
amount of money to pay for my weekend of lodging and food (Abbey-suggested
amount: “that is between you and God”), about whether I can continue what I’ve
experienced over the last few days but IRL. Can I hide distractions, turn off my
computer, un-install my Spotify for stretches at a time, leave my phone in the
other room when I sleep? Can I communicate better, both with myself and with
those important to me? I think of the language we use when texting, compared to
emailing or writing a letter, compared to talking on the phone or talking face
to face, compared to those things we agonize over when we want to convey the
important-est of messages, and I think about the advance of technology and the
absolutely mad rush of twenty-first century America, compared to the deterioration
of meaningful introspection and communication, and how it has affected our
expectations – and the expectations placed on us – such that we must reply
now!, to the point where our smart phones not only suggest responses
(“great, thanks!”) but we take them up on the offer. Haste has
eliminated the personal, and like slow food that makes for a better meal, consciousness
of thought makes for a better person, if I might only give myself the time. If
we might only give ourselves the time.
“Tell me. What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
– Mary Oliver
Pass it on: On the Road with Jose