The Waters of Siloe

by Thomas Merton

  Fontgombault, however, was one of the houses that had to g°-

  Dom Edmond Obrecht had spent more than a year traveling around Europe in search of places of refuge where the expelled monks might go if the whole Order had to leave France. But now that Fontgombault was closed down, he could think of no better site to offer them than an abandoned farmhouse near Gethsemani. Here, the monks could find temporary shelter while they were waiting for a permanent home in the United States. Only about half the community sailed on “La Bretagne.” The rest scattered to various houses of the Order in France, while Fontgombault passed once again into secular hands and became a reform school.

  On the evening of June 10, 1903, the French Cistercians stepped down from the Louisville train and were greeted by the Gethsemani College band playing the Marseillaise. According to a written account that has come to us from the hand of one of them, they “were overcome with emotion.” Gethsemani was hung with French and American flags, and the cloister, paved with flowers for the Corpus Christi procession, made allusion to the guests: “Sacred Heart of Jesus,” one floral design spelled out, “save France.” There was even a big dinner for the travelers in the monastery guest house.

  But when the celebration and gaiety of the welcome had died down, the exiles had their hands full trying to establish themselves in a ruined farmhouse in the middle of a Kentucky summer. Mount Olivet—the home of Dom Edward’s stigmatic and of a group of nuns before that—was in such bad shape that the roof and walls leaked and cattle wandered into the ground-floor rooms to escape the rain. It took several weeks to make the place habitable. Finally, they were able to settle down and chant the office and work in their garden and make the acquaintance of poison ivy. It was not until the following year, 1904, that a good place was found for a permanent settlement.

  The parish of Jordan, in Albany County, Oregon, was in many ways an excellent place for Cistercians to build a monastery. There was plenty of timber—indeed, the pine trees of Oregon grew to a size that astounded these men from France. The orchards on those fertile hillsides yielded abundant crops of huge pears and plums and apples, and the land gave them plenty of grain and forage. It was a mild enough climate, and the only drawback was the heavy annual rainfall: and that did not prevent them from gathering in their crops and making their living.

  Unfortunately, the situation into which the monks moved when their first contingent arrived in Oregon on September 24, 1904, was altogether unfavorable from a spiritual point of view.

  To begin with, Archbishop Christie of Portland had invited the monks to Jordan with the rather quixotic idea that they would heal a division that had grown up in that parish of German farmers. The parishioners could not agree on the site of their church. Half the farmers, who lived on the plateau, wanted the church up near them. The others, down in the valley, wanted the church in their district. That was where the church had first been built, but it had burned down and had been rebuilt on the plateau.

  Now the monks moved into the new church and presbytery. The novelty was expected to make everybody happy, and certainly all these good Catholic farmers were glad to see the monks among them. But as far as permanent peace was concerned, the move was a failure.

  Meanwhile, the handful of Cistercian monks and brothers found themselves cooped up in a parish church to which the farmers and their wives and children came to join lustily in the singing of Mass and Vespers. Some of the monks slept in a small barn, others in the sacristy of the little church, and others still in the classroom of the parochial school. The children still were coming to classes, of course. And when the classes were over in the middle of the day, the schoolroom was hastily transformed into a monastery refectory. There was no farm attached to this property, only a field that was intended for a cemetery. In fact, all that the monks had was a parish church and everything that went with it. It was just what a Cistercian monastery ought not to be, and the situation makes one understand fully the strict injunction in the new Constitutions forbidding a new foundation to be made before there are enough buildings and land to keep the Rule and the Cistercian usages.

  There was a very good farm near the church, but the owner made them pay his own price for it. The monks took on the burden of this debt and set to work trying to pay it off in yearly installments, at the same time putting up a temporary monastery on their new land. Their generous parishioners helped the monks in every way they could with time and labor and ideas. One neighbor drew up the plans. The monks contributed their own share of the sweat—and the necessary lumber. Work began in the winter of 1905, but until the following Fourth of July some twenty Cistercians remained crowded in the little parish church and school.

  Meanwhile, they had put up a large sawmill, which they hoped would support their monastery. Unfortunately, it was badly situated, and the expense of hauling timber to the mill ate up all their profits. Then the mill caught fire and burned to the ground before the monks got around to insuring it.

  When Dom Edmond Obrecht came to Jordan in February, 1908, as the regular visitor delegated by the General Chapter, there was only one question in his mind: Would this monastery survive? It did not take him long to find the answer. The ruins of the sawmill, the huge debt, and the almost complete lack of novices and postulants told him all he needed to know of the accidents and errors of the abortive foundation. One year later the unanimous vote of the General Chapter decreed the suppression of Our Lady of Jordan. The pioneers were told either to return to Melleray or join some other Cistercian community of their own choice. That meant the complete extinction of the monastery that had been Fontgombault.

  The blow was a hard one for the pioneers. Most of them failed to understand that the command really was a command; it had to be reiterated, in fact it had to be fulminated, with a threat of ecclesiastical censure, before they would consent to give up their labors and leave Oregon. The Abbot General, Dom Augustin Marre, conveyed the command of the Chapter to the monks in person in November, 1910, and at last they moved out and scattered to the four winds. Some returned to France, some passed over to the Benedictines, who were well established on the Pacific coast; one or two entered the secular priesthood, but most of them went to the monastery of Our Lady of the Lake at Oka.

  Three of them, undeterred by the memory of two Kentucky summers at Mount Olivet, asked to be received at Gethsemani. Father Mary died there in 1932, in his seventy-first year. Brother Stephen became Gethsemani’s cook. When he could no longer cook he wove baskets until he, too, passed to the reward of good Cistercians in his eightieth year. The third, Father George, sinking his teeth with even greater tenacity into his Cistercian vocation, outlasted them both. He has celebrated a whole procession of jubilees. He still sits in the infirmary mending socks and making disciplines and comes to the conventual Mass in a wheel chair. Early in Lent, 1949, he received extreme unction, not in bed but in the monastery church and at the time of this writing he still says Mass and proves to be in no hurry to go to heaven.

  While the first Far West venture of the Cistercians was going to pieces in Oregon, the bitter struggle that Father Vin-vent de Paul Merle had started in Nova Scotia was still being carried on in New England. The monks who had been burned out of their home at Petit Clairvaux had retired for a short time to Our Lady of the Lake, in Canada, where they caught their breath and prepared to move on to Rhode Island.

  Dom John Mary Murphy, the new superior and former prior at Oka, took ten companions and all the cattle and furniture and books and vestments and pots and pans—in fact, everything that was left of Petit Clairvaux except the shell of the building—and moved to the Blackstone Valley between Providence and Pawtucket. That was in August, 1900. The pleasant fields and woodlands that now surround Our Lady of the Valley were not there to cheer the souls of the pioneers. They found three hundred acres of land that had been stripped of trees and was covered with small growth, brushwood, and tangled briars, with here and there a full-sized oak. What was worse, the land was littered with st
ones, and one did not have to dig far below the surface of the soil before one hit solid granite. The huge continental ice sheet that once covered New England had scoured this terrain down to its foundations and scattered stones all over the ground—which was euphemistically called “arable.” However, in the very heart of their property, by way of contrast, the monks found a quagmire. It was not only unpleasant, but a positive danger. It swallowed up at least three cows before it was finally drained, in recent years, by the labor of the monks. The property was dominated by a lugubrious memorial of Indian days, the “Nine Men’s Misery,” where the bones of nine men murdered by savages had been found.

  The Annals of the early years1 return over and over again to the sad refrain: “This farm, a stony waste, does not pay.” If their crops were not ruined by drought, they were washed out by floods. Then, the Trappists were not prepared for cutworms or potato bugs or army worms or corn borers. It was a struggle to save enough of some one vegetable to get through the winter. At times they were reduced to loading their wagons with stones—of which there was always a rich crop—to be sold to the stone crushers for a few cents a load, in order that they might buy some bread.

  The orchards were ravaged by insects. Twice the Annals lament that “caterpillars stripped our orchards bare.” As late as 1915 “the apple crop was a complete failure.” Also, the orchards were badly planned. One patch of fruit trees might be half a mile from the other, which meant that spraying was laborious and spasmodic. Picking was complicated by the muting of trees whose fruit ripened late with trees that gave an early crop.

  Of all the hard beginnings in America—and, for that matter, in any other part of the world—Cistercians have seldom had as crude a first home as the sixty-foot shack of planks that was called Our Lady of the Valley in 1900. Through the summer of their first year, however, the founders were busy putting up a two-story wooden house, which gave them satisfactory shelter. After that, they went to work on the first wing of a granite monastery. The three-story building, with verandah and dormer windows and little cupola, and standing back a hundred yards or so from the busy road to Woonsocket and Pawtucket, has become familiar to several generations of New England Catholics. The monastery was, unfortunately, half monastery and half hotel. The visitors’ parlor was separated from the monks’ chapel by a thin partition. The chanting of psalms was likely to be accompanied by gusts of business conversation, and secular matters would come floating in on the quiet air to complicate the monks’ evening meditation. The poverty of the house was so great that the monks were not able to lead a fully contemplative life. They never chanted the full office, seldom sang the conventual Mass: they had to recite the canonical hours in haste in order to get out to work and keep themselves from starving.

  It seemed to them that this course was all the more unavoidable because their community was so desperately small. They attracted few postulants and considered themselves fortunate to have a total of twenty-two members in 1910. But while they had had five priests in 1901, there were still only five priests when the founder, Dom John Mary Murphy, died in 1913. Three lay brothers were professed in the first six years, but it was not until 1908 that the first choir novice made his vows. The first priest ordained at Our Lady of the Valley was a certain Father Benedict, a veteran of Fontgombault and Our Lady of Jordan, who was still only a subdeacon when he came to Rhode Island. He was not ordained until 1915.

  In the crisis that followed the death of Dom John Mary in 1913, the General Chapter, after considering the proposal to suppress the Rhode Island monastery as a useless venture, turned it over to Dom Edmond Obrecht and Gethsemani. Thus, the Kentucky monastery once more adopted a daughter, as it had adopted Petit Clairvaux half a century before. But it was not this that saved Our Lady of the Valley or made it prosper.

  The one solution to all the difficulties of the Valley, the one thing which turned it from a failure into a success, should, after all, have been obvious. Perhaps the founders had not reasoned out their problems with the logic of the first Cistercians. They had thought material success was necessary before they could hope to be true contemplatives. They apparently believed that they would be able to give all the required time to prayer only when they had grown into a big, solid community with many novices. Actually, it was just the other way round. The reason they had no novices was precisely that they were not truly contemplatives. The reason they had such a struggle was that they could not give themselves entirely to the life of prayer that was required of them. . . .

  All this was abundantly proved by the work of Dom John O’Connor in the 1920’s. In 1924, after rejecting his plan of moving to a richer site, he might well have turned his thoughts to expedients to support the community. He might have built up a big, modern, dairy farm and started producing Port du Salut cheese on a large scale. There were scores of things that Trappists could manufacture—from chocolate to applejack. He might have gone into the production of any one of them with profit, except that Prohibition ruled out applejack for the time being. What he finally did might have seemed like wild luxury to some of his monks: at any rate, he began the construction of a big Gothic church. And that was what saved the monastery.

  As soon as the Rhode Island Trappists were liberated from their own guest house; as soon as the Divine Office took the place that belonged to it in their lives, without having to compete with any secondary interest; in a word, as soon as the contemplative element in the Rule received the full attention it deserves in a contemplative monastery—no matter how poor—the community began to get vocations. The mysterious, vital force that attracts men of prayer to a center of the interior life made itself felt. Postulants came in greater and greater numbers to devote their lives to God. During the twenty years that followed the construction of the church, Our Lady of the Valley twice doubled its numbers. Between 1928 and 1938 it grew from thirty-five to seventy-four; during the next ten years it went up to one hundred and forty-two. By that time, the pressure was enough to burst the walls. The monks made a foundation in New Mexico, as we shall see later.

  As the community grew, it also put up more and more defenses between itself and the world. It withdrew into its own interior silence and peace. After adding another wing of monastic buildings, the monks put up a new novitiate in 1936. In the same year they set up a gatehouse between themselves and the busy main road. Entrenched in the privacy on which the contemplative life so largely depends, the Cistercians at Our Lady of the Valley have developed a great love for the traditions and austerities of the Order. They have done more than any other house of the Order in the United States to bring their chant and their liturgy up to the required level. They have remodeled and simplified their sanctuary, they have put Cistercian glass in their church windows—not stained, but only tinted, glass, with very elementary geometric designs, in keeping with the customs of the Order. Meanwhile, they still look forward to completing their monastery, which will mean the destruction of the old guest house and one more step toward privacy by the erection of a new one outside the enclosure. Then they will be able to devote the remaining two sides of their cloister to purely monastic uses.

  Our Lady of the Valley became a full-fledged abbey in 1945, during the lifetime of Dom John O’Connor. He was, however, a hopeless invalid and had already resigned his office as titular prior into the hands of Dom Edmund Futterer, who was elected and installed as abbot in that same year. Besides his new foundation in New Mexico, Dom Edmund is occupied, at the time of writing, with the building of the first Trappistine convent in the United States. The nuns are not in the habit of living in log cabins—although they have had their share of austerity in the past, too—and they will await the completion of regular buildings before they sail from Our Lady of Glencairn, in Ireland, to settle at Wrentham, just across the Massachusetts state line from the Valley.

  The foundation of Our Lady of the Valley in 1901 was the beginning of a small procession of foundations in North and South America—a series which made Cistercian histo
ry in the New World quite an animated affair for the first few years of the new century. Most of them were the fruit of the antireligious legislation of Waldeck-Rousseau in France.

  In 1901 the French monks of Bonnecombe decided to prepare a refuge for themselves in New Brunswick, and so they established an annex in the diocese of Chatham. The monks arrived and settled in the new house, Notre Dame du Calvaire (Our Lady of Calvary), in the fall of 1902.

  One sometimes wonders if there is more than a merely poetic appropriateness about the names of Cistercian monasteries. Are the communities of this Order called to participate intimately in the mysteries in honor of which their respective houses were founded? In the case of Our Lady of Calvary, this would seem to be evident. Even though every Trappist monastery has a great deal of Calvary about it, this little priory, hidden away in the woods of New Brunswick, has had a history of troubles and hardships which have brought its members into close union with Christ on the Cross.

  From their first days in a little temporary wooden monastery, down to 1948, when their farm buildings burned to the ground, the Acadian Trappists have had a life of exceptional poverty and hard labor. Dom Anthony Piana, the founder of the house, loved Calvary—both the Calvary on which Christ suffered and the community named after it. As he lay dying of an exceedingly painful sickness, he could think of no better prayer to utter than, “Lord, send me more pain!” That was in 1939.

  In that year Calvary got a new prior, who came all the way from the famous Dutch abbey of Koeningshoeven at Tilburg, Holland. His name was Dom Cherubin Lennssen, and he left behind him at Tilburg a twin brother who had entered the abbey with him as an oblate at the age of eleven and received the name of Seraphin. Under Dom Cherubin’s guidance, the small Acadian community, numbering a bare thirty-five members, has struggled on and strengthened its position to some extent. The French founders have all died, and the majority of the monks are natives of New Brunswick.