The Waters of Siloe

by Thomas Merton

  It can be seen, then, that all the good that had been done by reuniting the Cistercian congregations into a new Order, and all the spiritual energy flowing from that union were in serious danger of being poured out in active works which were contrary to the Cistercian spirit and vocation. An orphanage here and there, an occasional chocolate factory or textile mill, and perhaps an agricultural school or a boys’ college—these would not seriously harm the Order. But the danger of entering into wholesale missionary activities was serious. And this fact is proved by the story, or rather the phenomenon, of Mariannhill.

  Mariannhill was born of a combination of dynamic forces. Trappists from Germany had planted a foundation in Bosnia (Yugoslavia) which had rapidly grown to tremendous pro portions. The great new monastery of Mariastern had over two hundred monks and brothers at the turn of the century. It was easily the biggest house the Cistercians had had anywhere since the Golden Age—although its size was no asset. On the contrary, it was too big. Even supposing they all have genuine vocations, a hundred religious are too many for any one superior in the contemplative life. They cannot be guided. The monastery becomes noisy and crowded and full of a bustling life that is hard to keep flowing smoothly in the proper channels. Mariastern, however, was in the hands of an abbot who combined German genius for leadership and German energy with a powerful and deep religious idealism. Dom Franz Pfanner looked like an Old Testament prophet. The eyes that burned in that long, aquiline countenance flamed like the eyes of a visionary, and the sensitive lips that quivered in that prophetic beard were ready to command no one knew what Crusades. In later life Dom Franz completed the picture with long, gray, flowing locks that were combed back from his shining brow to fall in profusion about his shoulders. But by that time his ideals and his energy had led him far away from the Order of Cîteaux.

  At Mariastern Dom Franz had been the patriarch of what almost amounted to a small town rather than a mere monastery. The vast population of his community was occupied not in one but in several factories, in addition to working on their vast properties. There were a textile mill, a tannery, a cheese factory, a brewery—and the inevitable orphanage. Yet, all that was nothing to what was to come when Dom Franz found a field where he could really go to work and express his ideals.

  One day, before the reunion, he received an invitation to make a foundation in South Africa. He brought the project to the General Chapter of the second largest and second strictest of the existing congregations, that of Sept-Fons, to which he belonged. That was in 1879. He went forth, armed with permissions and blessings, to build in Natal, in the brown hills a few miles inland from Durban. The name Mariannhill manages to do reverence in Dutch to both Our Lady and St. Ann.

  Dom Franz and his men, as soon as they had found a suitable site, went to work with all their accustomed energy. The climate was excellent, though subtropical. The rich soil was soon bringing forth an abundance of coffee, sugar cane, pineapples, bananas, and many other fruits and vegetables. A talented lay brother designed a new monastery, and soon not only were a cloister and all the regular places finished and in use, but a multitude of shops had come into existence. Besides the smithy and carpenter shop and the other ordinary “employments” one would expect around a Trappist monastery, there were a printing press and a photographic studio. Furthermore, the brothers were energetically building roads into the interior of the country and casting bridges over the rapid mountain streams.

  What was the meaning of all this printing and road building? The answer was to be sought in the jubilant reception that the monks had received from the Kaffirs. Friendliness, sincerity, and joy, as well as intelligence and vigorous artistic talent, combine with all kinds of natural energy and versatility to make these natives ideal subjects for the kind of training that Dom Franz Pfanner could excel in giving them.

  Within a few short months Mariannhill had already expanded beyond all Dom Urban Guillet’s wildest missionary dreams. The Kaffirs not only accepted the opportunity to send their children to the school that was opened by the monks. They did more than merely consent to come to the parish church that had been opened for them. They literally invaded the property, swarmed down on the monks, and flung themselves into the life of work and prayer with all the zeal and fervor of the monks themselves. Soon the printing press was running off hundreds of Kaffir catechisms, and the roads into the interior were pointing the way for monks to start long missionary trips on horseback inland into the mountains. Chiefs of distant tribes soon were asking Dom Franz to send priests to their villages and start schools and build churches.

  The result was one of the most phenomenal chapters in the history of Catholic missions. Mariannhill established mission stations in Natal, Transvaal, Basutoland, Bechuanaland, Cape Colony, and even hundreds of miles up the coast in German East Africa. Recruiting for all these posts was not possible in South Africa itself, of course; Dom Franz had started a seminary at Wurzburg, Bavaria, just to attract and form subjects for his huge South African venture.

  Here was the astonishing spectacle of a Trappist mission in which the contemplative monks had achieved, in a few short years, a success more spectacular than many an active Order had dared dream of, and the Cistercians of the Strict Observance woke up to the fact that the reunion of the congregations had brought them an order within an order. There was more energy and more exterior prosperity in the houses that had grown out of this obscure South African foundation than could be found almost anywhere else in the Order.

  The most astounding thing about this new mission was that it was operating on purely Benedictine lines. It was an apostolate of prayer and labor, of liturgy and the plough. What was taking place in the outposts established by Dom Franz Pfanner was exactly the same process that had marked the Christianization of Germany and all northern Europe by the Benedictine monks hundreds of years before.

  Each mission post was a small monastery with several priests and half a dozen or more brothers. Joined to it was a small community of sisters belonging to a new congregation founded by Dom Franz to teach in the schools he was building. Around each church and school there grew up a whole village of Christian Kaffirs with a guest house for travelers and all kinds of workshops. The monks taught the natives every conceivable craft and instructed them in painting, music, photography, and a dozen other arts. The most promising natives were prepared for the priesthood in a new seminary at Mariannhill. The bulk of the population worked the land on vast cooperative farms. The beauty of the life was not simply in its material productiveness but in the fact that all this was centered on the church and found its fullest culminating expression in the great liturgical feasts which so delighted the hearts of the Kaffirs. They filled the churches and sang with their fine voices and formed huge processions and crowded to the Sacraments with a fervor that took away the breath of the priests ministering to them. Soon the South African veldt was clotted with monastic colonies named after all the famous shrines of Europe: Reichenau, Einsiedeln, Monte Cassino, Lourdes, Czenstochau, Clairvaux, Cîteaux . . . and a hundred others.

  Clairvaux was a group of kraals gathered around a church under some eucalyptus and cedar trees in the heart of a rocky valley. Cîteaux was a small chapel on a bare hillside, facing the gaunt outline of a distant mountain ridge. Lourdes nestled in a friendlier landscape of woods and fields, and the two towers of its church—which had something of the proportions of a small cathedral—dominated fertile orchards and gardens and a colony of brick schoolhouses and cottages.

  The blessing of God upon this work leaves us no doubt as to its providential character: but one important and obvious thing remains to be said. The day the first catechism came off the brothers’ press, and the day the first stone was laid for the mission church at Reichenau, the monks of Mariannhill had ceased to be pure contemplatives.

  The Rule of St. Benedict, the usages of Cîteaux, were nothing but a dream in that hive of active apostles, who were liable to be spending days on horseback and nights teaching and
preaching all over South Africa. Silence was forgotten. The office was never sung except on Sundays. Feasts of two Masses existed only in theory, and even on ordinary days the monks were so busy saying Mass for the Kaffirs that a secular priest was sometimes called in to sing—or rather to say—the conventual Mass for the community. Although the Kaffirs did a great deal of manual labor under the guidance of the brothers and sisters, the monks were too busy being missionaries to have any time for the gardens or the fields. As for fasting—so far were they from that, that they took two mixts, or breakfasts, when the rest of the Order was limited to a tiny frustulum or nothing at all. The second mixt went by the name of zwischenbrot— the snack of bread that came between breakfast and dinner.

  The Cistercian Order could not help but be concerned over this state of affairs. Dom Franz had long since decided to retire and was living at a mission station called Emmaus, which was so small that it was practically a hermitage; but it was not until 1904, the year of the death of Dom Sebastian Wyart, the first Abbot General of the new Order, that the Cistercians finally took definite steps to find out what was really going on at Mariannhill and to determine whether they could do anything about it.

  This brings us at last to the connection between Mariannhill and Gethsemani. It is a long way from Kentucky to Natal: but that great distance was several times bridged by the fourth abbot of the American proto-abbey. He was appointed apostolic administrator of Mariannhill by the Holy See, and his real task was to try and see if the missionaries could not be persuaded to retain enough of the contemplative life to be able to call themselves Cistercians. But by that time things had gone too far and the task was hopeless. Mariannhill was lost to the Order and became an independent missionary congregation which, incidentally, has continued to prosper and to carry on its magnificent work in Africa for nearly seventy years.

  The man who had the thankless job of trying to work out a compromise between Mariannhill and Cîteaux was to become one of the most important and valuable men to devote their gifts and energy to the service of the reconstituted Cistercian Order in the beginning of the twentieth century. He was Dom Edmond Obrecht. His work in South Africa was only one of a score of similar legations that took him to every corner of the world where a Cistercian monastery existed. Yet, in spite of his crowded activities, it was also due to Dom Edmond that Gethsemani weathered the most serious crisis in its own history and attained the prominence which it occupies in the American Church today.

  Dom Edmond Obrecht was a man of big ideas. His mind took in the whole expanse of the world. He was always much more than merely an abbot of a community of monks hidden away in the woods of Kentucky. It was because he had been recognized as a great person that he had been sent to Kentucky in the first place.

  However, to understand the situation fully, we must retrace our steps to the years before the reunion. The scene is once more Gethsemani. It is the middle of August, 1890. In the blinding Kentucky heat the monks are moving in a slow file to the cemetery, chanting psalms. In the open bier, the dead Dom Benedict Berger wears a miter. His face is white, with the rigid outlines of something carved out of stone.

  At the grave’s edge his mitered successor is moving about the bier, gently swinging a censer that curls with the smoke of incense. Prayers are chanted. We consider the face of the new abbot. We see the features of a much milder man, full of gentleness and resignation. The lines in that countenance spell a whole story of suffering. But there is something almost wistful about the expression. It is not a weak face, by any means; but this kind and patient soul seems to be saying: I do not want to be the kind of abbot my predecessor was: in fact, I do not really want to be abbot of this monastery at all. . . .

  The third abbot of Gethsemani, the one who intervened between Dom Benedict and Dom Edmond, has lapsed into obscurity, almost forgotten. He was not a powerful personality, and he did not leave much of a mark on Gethsemani. He has vanished like a wisp between the two giants who precede and follow him.

  Yet, Dom Edward Chaix-Bourbon was a person of some distinction—not that his name attached him, as some thought, to the royal house of France. He came of well-to-do parents in the Alpine province of Dauphin^. One would have expected him to enter religion at the Grande Chartreuse. But the fact that he came so far before taking the religious habit is characteristic of him. As a young man, he had tried in vain to settle down and find himself a place in the world. He wandered from Vienne to Lyons, from there to Paris, then to Le Havre. A man of his character could not stay long in a seaport without succumbing to the urge to set sail for distant lands. Soon he found himself teaching French in New Orleans. When the Civil War broke out, he left the city and traveled aimlessly until, one day, he happened upon the little log-cabin monastery of Gethsemani. That was in 1860, when the new buildings were still unoccupied. Edward Chaix-Bourbon was so impressed by the deep recollection of the Trappist monks as they filed out to work that he asked to be admitted to the monastery.

  Dom Benedict, who had just assumed power, gave the new novice the full benefit of his zeal for humiliating others. He put him through all the tricks, insulted him, mocked him in the presence of distinguished visitors, and exhausted his ingenuity in devising penances for Frater Edward to perform in the refectory. For instance, when the young man confessed a secret dislike for a certain Brother Lazarus, Dom Benedict made him go and kiss the brother’s feet and then stand in front of him during the whole time of dinner. No one seems to have stopped to ask how Brother Lazarus felt about all this: after all, it was a public penance for a secret fault. But if this was the same Brother Lazarus who went off to join the Carthusians over a score of years later, we can sympathize with his desire to take his meals unmolested. Just imagine how it would be if, day after day, as you tried to absorb your soup and turnips with your wooden spoon, a new and different religious came and stood before you, hanging his head in perfect silence and without any evident reason. It would be enough to give a man a persecution complex, let alone ruin his digestion.

  Frater Edward, on the other hand, seemed to have a wonderful capacity for taking all this without even a shadow of emotion ruffling his meekness and composure. Dom Benedict did not conceal his admiration from anyone except, of course, Frater Edward himself. In fact, when he was in France on a routine visit to the General Chapter, Dom Benedict once spoke to the Cistercian nuns of Notre Dame des Gardes and told them of the wonderful novice he had at Gethsemani. “I can do anything I like with him,” he said. “His obedience is perfect; the man is faultless.”

  One of the good nuns was so moved that she exclaimed, “Oh! Reverend Father! Perhaps one day he will be our chaplain!”

  “Not a chance,” said Dom Benedict with a dry laugh.

  He was already grooming Frater Edward as his successor: but the fact is, Dom Benedict’s faultless novice was to die as chaplain of the nuns at Les Gardes, and he was much happier as a chaplain of nuns than as an abbot of monks.

  To tell the truth, Dom Edward had qualities that might have made him a very successful abbot if he had been put in charge of some other house at some other time. He was a deeply spiritual person, a saintly man. What Dom Benedict had said about his humility and obedience was quite true. He had astounding patience and good humor, and his friendliness and sympathetic nature, coupled with lively intelligence and a profound understanding of the spiritual life, destined him to be a director of souls.

  But he was not equipped to take charge of an abbey like Gethsemani at the very crisis of its history.

  Dom Edward Chaix-Bourbon was a sociable man, but his choice of friends was one of the biggest sources of trouble for Gethsemani. Among his friends was a visionary lady from Chicago who was nursing what appeared to be stigmata, in the old farmhouse of Mount Olivet, on the monks’ property. Worse still was the man whom Dom Edward had engaged as principal of Gethsemani College. The latter’s mismanagement of affairs nearly ruined the college and brought down untold troubles upon the heads of the innocent monks. In the end
it became evident to all that Dom Edward had the simplicity of a dove but none of the prudence of the serpent; and Christ had warned His disciples that they must possess both.

  Returning from the General Chapter of 1895, Dom Edward found his community in a ferment. The only American choir monk, young Frater Frederic Dunne was immediately put in charge of the college. He managed to restore order, but great harm had been done. Dom Edward finally wrote to Dom Sebastian Wyart, the new General of the Reformed Cistercians, and tendered his resignation as abbot of Gethsemani. It was not a gesture of despair on his own part; rather, the circumstances were such that it was the only thing left to do. But all the same it was with the greatest relief that the simple, peace-loving religious resigned a charge that was odious to him and embarked at once for France.

  Soon the ageing abbot was settled in a position that fitted him admirably in every detail. He had a nice quiet room all to himself at the Trappistine convent of Les Gardes. He had plenty of leisure for prayer and contemplation and nothing to do but hear the confessions of the sisters and charm them with his tender, humorous, and fatherly discourses on the ways of prayer and the love of their Divine Bridegroom. There is no doubt that his labors bore rich fruits at Notre Dame des Gardes, where he is still venerated as a most saintly priest. After suffering a long sickness with the most heroic patience, Dom Edward finally died in February, 1901. From every part of the Vendée, crowds came to pay enthusiastic homage to a man whose name was held in benediction among them. He was buried at the convent, and the nuns surrounded his tomb with affectionate veneration.