The Waters of Siloe

by Thomas Merton

  In the meantime, however, he was still supposed to be the prior of a community of contemplative monks. It was he who supervised the river journey of the body of the community to St. Louis, where they disembarked and went to Florissant, Missouri. There, John Mullanphy, Missouri’s first millionaire, had offered them two houses and some land rent free for a year. While they were trying to decide whether to acquire this property, as they had a chance to do, they were offered four hundred acres across the river at Cahokia, Illinois. They accepted the offer.

  They moved over to their new home, in its rather fantastic setting, and settled in a log cabin. All around them on the plain were a series of low, regular, wooded mounds rising out of the prairie. Even covered as they were with trees, one suspected that these hills were not the work of nature. The fact is, they were a group of great Indian burial mounds. Here, among the bones of forgotten tribes, the Trappists settled down and got ready to build. It was the autumn of 1809.

  Unfortunately, before they had a chance to dig themselves a well, the polluted waters of Cahokia Creek infected the whole community with typhoid fever.

  When Dom Urban arrived in November with the farm animals and a contingent of young Kentuckians who wanted to remain with the monks as oblates, he found his community in desperate condition.

  “The first person I met,” he wrote in a letter, “informed me that our Fr. Prior was very sick. Although this was not a pleasant bit of news, I thought I was getting off lightly with only one person sick; but on coming up to the monastery I found quite a different condition of things. I observed a priest with death painted all over his face, carrying with difficulty to some others sicker than himself a little soup which he had made with still greater difficulty. All were dangerously sick, and were lying in a wretched shack, without windows or chimney, and with the wind blowing in on every side.”3

  Dom Urban, with his usual enthusiastic devotion to his men, threw himself wholeheartedly into the service of the sick, with the result that he himself soon went down with the fever too. However, the Trappists rebounded from this, as from all their other trials, with the same extraordinary vitality and elasticity. This time only one of them died.

  Soon a clean well was dug, cabins were built, and they were taking the rigors of a midwestern winter in their stride.

  Dom Urban and Father Joseph would get on their horses and ride across the ice-covered Mississippi to minister to the faithful in St. Louis, St. Charles, Florissant, or Portage-des-Sioux; as usual, Dom Urban spent most of his days on horseback. He would ride across the prairies with the breviary in his hands, reciting his office. Often he was so busy that he did not break his fast until nine o’clock in the evening, and then he would sometimes have to hurry through the Little Hours, Vespers, and Compline before retiring late to bed. Against the icy winds of the northwest, his Trappist robe offered small protection. He had worn the same one for thirteen years, and wool tends to get rather thin with use. And here in Illinois he was able to compare the cold with what the monks had experienced ten years before in Russia.

  In the log-cabin monastery that was called Our Lady of Good Counsel, among the Indian burial mounds, the food froze on the tables in January and February of 1810.

  In spite of all these obstacles, the courageous energy of the Trappist monks, fed by a heroic faith, soon had just as flourishing a monastery on Looking Glass Prairie as they had once had in Kentucky. Here, too, their main support was watchmaking. They were able to barter watches and clocks for cattle, leather, tallow, blankets, wheat, corn, and everything else they needed. In a short time they had some eighteen log cabins scattered among the mounds, four or five of which were grouped on one of the mounds themselves, constituting the monastery. The rest were stables and shops and barns. Once again the fields were waving with corn and wheat, and on the terrace of the largest mound they had a vegetable garden. Wheat was growing on the top—the site proposed for the future permanent monastery. If it had ever been built, it would have made a rather impressive sight, visible for several miles across the plain.

  The traveler and explorer, Henry Brackenridge, whose curiosity drew him to this strange encampment in 1811, has left us a description of it. It is an accurate and living picture which anyone who has lived in a Trappist monastery would recognize, in its essentials, although it is colored by the peculiar subjective dispositions of the writer.

  Brackenridge had walked into the farmyard, where the monks and oblates were busy with their work. Because nobody paid any attention to him, he became depressed and came to the conclusion that the monks were extremely gloomy men.

  “On entering the yard,” he writes, “I found a number of persons at work, some hauling and storing away the crop of corn, others shaping timber for some intended edifice. A considerable number of these were boys from ten to fourteen years of age. The effect on my mind was inexpressibly strange at seeing them pass and repass in perfect silence. What force must it require to subdue the sportive disposition of boyhood! But nothing is so strong as nature!” continues the uneasy explorer, relieved to find something to bolster up his shaken confidence in the animal inside his own skin. “I admired,” he says, “the cheerful drollery of a poor malatto lad with one leg who was attending the horse mill. As the other boys passed by he always managed by some odd gesticulation to attract their attention. He generally succeeded in exacting a smile. It was a faint gleam of sunshine which seemed to say that their happiness was not entirely surrounded by the lurid gloom that surrounded them.” The italics are Brackenridge’s own—the quivering protest of his indignant gregarious humanity, still peeved that no one had come to offer him a cigar and shake him by the hand, slap him on the shoulder and draw up a chair to talk about business.

  “Fatigued with this scene,” he continues—the monks were doing all the work, and he was the one who complained of fatigue!—“which I contemplated apparently unobserved, I ascended the mound which contains their dwellings. This is nearly twenty-five feet in height, the ascent aided by a slanting road. I wandered about here for some time in expectation of being noticed. . . . ”

  However, we must concede that by this time he had some right to expect a sign of that hospitality which St. Benedict prescribed should be offered to all who came to the monastery, as to Christ Himself. Soon Father Joseph, “a sprightly, intelligent man in the prime of life,” put in an appearance and began to show the visitor around. Afterward, he offered him a vegetable dinner. Brackenridge was surprised to find a watchmaker’s shop “better furnished than any in St. Louis.” In the same building he noticed a library that was “indifferent . . . a few medical works of no great repute and the rest composed of the dreams of the fathers and the miraculous wonders of the world of the saints.”4

  In 1811 the monks still were laboring under tremendous difficulties. The year before, when Dom Urban had been in Washington telling the senators about his prospects for an Indian school and trying to obtain title to four thousand more acres of land at Cahokia, the crops had failed and the entire community was mowed down by another epidemic.

  This time five of the community died, and they had to sell two mares and their only anvil, to get funds to build and equip an infirmary.

  In 1812 the region was shaken with earthquakes, but none of the monks’ cabins was destroyed. In the Illinois territory the Indians still outnumbered the whites three to one, and there were many murders and acts of violence in the neighborhood of the monastery. But the monks themselves were never molested. The Indians displayed a friendly curiosity toward these men, so different from the other violent colonists who had come to settle in the land of their fathers. During the War of 1812 volunteer parties of fighters had to be called to arms to resist sudden attacks of Indians from the northwest, and sometimes Third Order members and oblates from the monastery were summoned to join these bands.

  The greatest handicap of the monks was their extreme poverty. But they were used to it by this time. They continued to build up their monastery and their farm. The
y were, in fact, responsible for some innovations in the region. They were the first to introduce mules to the Illinois territory—not a very extraordinary distinction, no doubt—and the first to mine coal there. They had seen the earth burning at the foot of a tree struck by lightning and, having dug into the ground, discovered a vein of coal, which provided fuel for the monastery blacksmiths.

  Far from being depressed by the “lurid gloom” which had left such an impression on the tenderhearted Brackenridge, the oblates and Third Order members showed themselves eager to enter into a fuller participation in the austere life. In the terrible year of 1810 a number of the oblates asked to be admitted as novices, desiring to go on and take vows. But they were under eighteen, and the regulations of La Val Sainte prohibited their admission. A lay teacher of the Third Order, twenty-four years old, also asked to be admitted as a religious. So, even at Cahokia, where they were much worse off than they had been anywhere else in America, the monks still stood a fair chance of succeeding.

  But in 1813 orders came from Dom Augustin de Lestrange that the community was to close up the monastery in Cahokia and join him in the East. He had brought a group of monks to the United States by way of Martinique, and now his plan was to reunite all his American colonists into one big group and start a single foundation near New York.

  In those days it was, indeed, near New York: a pleasant country site on Manhattan Island, a mile or two from the edge of the city. The monks all traveled, accordingly, to New York, where they took over a school that had been abandoned by the Jesuits. It was on a quiet suburban road among gardens and orchards. The Trappists settled there in 1814, and got under way with their farming, their life of prayer, and their schoolteaching. This time, apparently, they were also going to take over an orphan asylum.

  However, news came from France that Napoleon had fallen and was interned at Elba. This put an end to the whole American experiment at one blow. Dom Augustin marshaled his men once more, obtained passage for France on several vessels, and prepared to embark.

  It looked like a defeat. Nearly ten years of the most bitter hardships were now to be forgotten and left, as it were, without fruit. There might have been by this time a firmly established monastery of Cistercians, building themselves a permanent church and cloister of stone in the hills of Pennsylvania or Kentucky. But no, they were all leaving America—except, of course, Father Joseph Dunand, who had stayed behind among the Sioux Indians.

  But Providence knew what it was about. If the monks had settled in America then, their first thought would certainly have been the building of a school—a college. In fifty years it would have been a university. Imagine the Trappists of Kentucky trying to lead the contemplative life with a university campus at their front door—setting out to work with the full-throated roar of a crammed stadium echoing across their fields, or getting up for the night office while their protégés were rolling home from some triumphal celebration and bellowing, “We are the silent men from Casey Creek. . . . ”

  God definitely foresaw the danger of a St. Bernard’s University, Cahokia, and decided that it would have to die before it was even born.

  As for the New York site—that was the worst of all. The fields and orchards, where the monks held a Corpus Christi procession among flowering altars in the sunny countryside of June, 1814, are now occupied by towers of steel and stone. The quiet suburban road became, of course, Fifth Avenue. The house which the monks occupied was eventually replaced by St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and the fields where they worked for a while have all vanished under the skyscrapers of Rockefeller Center.

  The monks had another scare soon after their landing in France. Napoleon broke out of Elba, and the Trappists all scattered into private homes during the Hundred Days. But after Waterloo the Trappists were once more free in their native land. La Trappe was repurchased, and Dom Urban began negotiations to procure the old Feuillants monastery of Bellefontaine. He spent two years begging in France to raise the price of the property and was on his way to pay It down when the last characteristic mishap crowned his life of reverses and accidents.

  He stopped at an inn for food. His horse was tethered outside with all Dom Urban’s money in the saddlebags. When the guileless Trappist came out from his meal, he was astonished to find that the money was gone.

  V

  The Trappists in Nova Scotia; Petit Clairvaux

  WHEN Dom Augustin and his monks sailed from New York in the autumn of 1814, the strange story of the Val Sainte Trappists in North America was not quite ended. In fact, its strangest episode was just about to begin. By a Providential accident, the congregation maintained a more or less theoretical foothold in the New World, and eventually the last survivor of Dom Augustin’s expedition was able to make a foundation in Nova Scotia. And this was to be the first Trappist monastery in the New World that was actually a success. True, Petit Clairvaux went out of existence in the 1920’s: but the monastery of Our Lady of the Valley, in Rhode Island, is of the same transplanted stock and flourishes mightily today.

  Father Vincent de Paul Merle had been left behind in New York with six lay brothers to settle the affairs of the Trappists and arrange for the shipment of their heavy baggage—those ploughs and choir books that had wandered all over the Middle West. He and his companions finally took ship in April, 1815. In May they were at Halifax. There, they were told that their vessel had been ordered to turn into the St. Lawrence and sail up to Quebec, so they had to find accommodations on another ship leaving for France. They did so and went on board. However, the wind was in the wrong quarter, so Father Vincent went ashore to buy some provisions.

  While he was in town, the wind changed and the ship cast off. When he got back to the waterfront, she was almost out of sight down the long bay.

  Father Vincent had a guinea in his pocket and a breviary which he had brought with him to say some of the day hours between errands. He was wearing his second-best robe. That was all he had.

  Nevertheless, he was not completely shattered by this accident. The truth is, Father Vincent was as zealous a missionary as Father Joseph Dunand: so much so that many people in the Order have accused him of getting stranded in Nova Scotia on purpose. And of all those who were disappointed when the American foundations were given up for good, Father Vincent had been the most grieved.

  Yet, he was an exemplary Trappist. As a model son of Dom Augustin, his devotion to the will of God amounted to an obsession. Like his General, he was always talking and writing and thinking about La sainte volonté de Dieu. 1He would certainly never have engineered a deliberate plot to disobey his superiors. But from what we know of his character it is not impossible that some unconscious urge kept him lingering in Halifax longer than was necessary that day when the ship sailed for France.

  So, he was able to give a sigh that had, perhaps, much secret satisfaction in it, and to resign himself to the fact that it was La sainte volonté de Dieu that had placed him in this land, which was almost destitute of priests; where there were numerous colonies of French Catholics and scores of settlements full of Micmac Indians who had once received the faith from missionaries, but who had now been without priests for fifty years and were going completely to pieces. He met dozens of them hanging around the streets of Halifax, half drunk or half starved, waiting to make a touch and pick up some small coin.

  Since there were only two priests in that part of Nova Scotia, of whom one was just about to leave for Ireland and the other was half dead, Father Vincent’s suggestion that he might pitch in and help with the parish work in Halifax and its surroundings was received with the greatest enthusiasm by Bishop Plessis of Quebec. Meanwhile, a letter followed Dom Augustin to Europe and brought back permission to stay in Nova Scotia and try to make a Trappist foundation there.

  So, Father Vincent de Paul Merle settled down for the winter.

  He was well prepared to face all the difficulties of the active life, this Trappist. Father Vincent had received the most austere training as a secular pri
est in Revolutionary France. Born in 1768 at Chalamont, near Lyons, he was the son of a doctor who was also a pious Catholic. Before the Revolution broke out he had been educated by the Jesuits in Lyons. When the storm came, Dr. Merle was thrown into prison because of his religion, and his son fled to Switzerland to enter La Val Sainte. However, his health broke down. He received minor orders and the subdiaconate somewhere in Switzerland, re-crossed the border, and went to work as a catechist in the archdiocese of Lyons.

  Although the persecution had lost some of its virulence, young Merle was taking his life in his hands when he entered upon this work. But such services as his were desperately needed.

  A few years of the Terror had practically de-Christianized the land, as far as organized worship and instruction were concerned. The archbishop was, of course, living in exile. The archdiocese of Lyons was being run by a vicar-general who lived in hiding and controlled a widespread but simple organization of secret missions. The territory had been divided into sections, each of which comprised some thirty or forty communes. In each commune, twenty villages or so were portioned out to a missionary. The priests were accompanied by catechists and “scouts” and bodyguards who prepared the way, kept their eyes open for trouble, and arranged for their escape in case they were denounced.

  Father Vincent was ordained priest on Holy Saturday, April 7, 1798. There were six others with him, and the ceremony was performed in the parlor of a private house by the Archbishop of Vienne, who had been traveling through the Alpine districts disguised as a peasant, administering Confirmation and the other Sacraments.

  Soon after his ordination Father Vincent was caught and imprisoned at Bourg. There, he was sentenced to deportation, but while he was waiting to begin the terrible journey to Rochefort, his jailer announced that the sentence had been changed and that he was to go to the guillotine the next day.