The Waters of Siloe

by Thomas Merton

  In the depths of his expansive heart there was nothing Dom Edmond Obrecht liked better than a big, colorful celebration. In that sense he was definitely a man of his time, and the Triple Jubilee at Gethsemani was, more than anything else, an expression of the fact that the Trappists had caught up with their times and were willing to display some of the booming optimism that flooded the whole of America in the 1920’s.

  Gethsemani, in 1924, was the ideal size for a Cistercian community. Its eighty-one members were evenly divided between professed monks and lay brothers. There were only a handful of novices, it is true, but the community was just big enough to keep most of the members from being overworked, without being so big that the abbot could not keep his finger on everything that was going on. It was now a thoroughly homogeneous “American” community, although there were still many monks who had come from distant countries to end their days in Kentucky. Above all, it was a regular, industrious, serious community of men who worked willingly for an abbot who made them work hard; they gave themselves wholeheartedly to an obscure and grueling quest for sanctity in the silence and poverty and all the vicissitudes of Trappist life.

  Perhaps the outstanding accomplishment of Dom Edmond’s regime in the spiritual order was in bringing Gethsemani finally under the unchallenged dominance of St. Thérèse of Lisieux and her “Little Way.”

  The Little Flower had had her devotees in the house since long before World War I. The undermaster of choir novices, Father Anthony, was a monk from an aristocratic Catholic family in Holland. His father, Senator James de Bruijn, had been made a Papal Chamberlain by Leo XIII, and his sister was a nun in a contemplative order in Italy. It was she who sent the first copy of The Story of a Soul ever to enter the citadel of ruthless severity that was La Trappe de Gethsemani. From that time on, the spirituality of the little Carmelite saint, who has exercised such a tremendous influence in the Church in our times, impressed itself upon the spiritual élite of the Kentucky abbey, and especially upon its prior. Dom Edmond was interested, but his interest changed to enthusiasm when the newly canonized St. Thérèse cured him of a dangerous illness in 1925.

  Dom Edmond had gone, as usual, to the General Chapter but had been struck down by an almost fatal heart attack before the Chapter opened. He barely managed to find his way to his old family home in Alsace, where he was confined to bed for several months, unable even to say Mass.

  The illness of one so prominent was a matter of consternation to the whole Order, and a stream of abbots and dignitaries came to visit Dom Edmond in his native village. The Bishop of Strasbourg even made him an honorary canon of his cathedral. The local villagers, in their turn, came to serenade him with a brass band outside his window. But even that did not kill Dom Edmond.

  As he lay in bed, too exhausted even to greet his visitors, he placed all his confidence in a relic of the Little Flower—a lock of her hair—which he kept over the head of his bed. When he finally got on his feet again, his first important journey was a pilgrimage to Lisieux.

  Then he boarded the liner for America and finally reached Gethsemani. The monks had never expected to see him again alive. In fact, they did not know how fortunate they were: on his recovery Dom Edmond had tried to resign his charge, but his resignation was not accepted by the Abbot General.

  The years that followed, 1927 and 1928, were both marked by pilgrimages to Lisieux: and Dom Edmond Obrecht was no ordinary pilgrim! He not only entered the sacred enclosure of Carmel, armed with special permission from Rome, but he conversed with St. Thérèse’s three living sisters, cementing with them a warm and lasting friendship. And he not only became their friend; he was officially adopted into the family.

  As a result, the Cistercians of Gethsemani and the Carmelites of Lisieux have become brothers and sisters in an especially close sense. The various feasts of each year witness an exchange of greetings and gifts and all the charming courtesies so characteristic of the daughters of St. Theresa. Gethsemani has by no means suffered from this Providential exposure to the warmth and playfulness and finesse of the Carmelites, who so well know how to temper their austerity with good humor.

  There can be no doubt that this warmth from across the ocean did something to thaw out the vestiges of chilliness that still lurked in corners of this big, bare Kentucky abbey. More than that, it was after St. Thérèse was appointed ex officio novice mistress at Gethsemani that the astonishing flood of vocations began to come in. . . .

  Camel’s new saint had not ended her favors for Dom Edmond when she cured him in France in 1925. Eight years later, after an automobile accident near Gethsemani in which, by rights, everybody should have been killed in the head-on collision, Dom Edmond developed a gangrenous foot. It soon became so serious that the doctor feared he would have to amputate it. But among the abbot’s other ailments there was a diabetic condition which made the operation impossible. The community began a novena to the Little Flower, and the father prior slipped a relic of hers into the bandage he put on the abbot’s foot.

  The next day, he walked in and found the doctor scratching his head and trying to work out some explanation for the fact that the old abbot was out of danger and his foot on the way to being healed. That was in 1933.

  Dom Edmond’s course was nearly run. Sleepless nights and a body full of pain left the aged Trappist without rest or strength, yet he insisted on going to the General Chapter and making an emergency visit to Our Lady of the Valley, where Dom John was seriously ill. Finally, as 1934 drew on, he had to be altogether confined to his room. His last appearance among his monks was typical. It was November 1, the Feast of All Saints. Dom Edmond came to the morning chapter to address the community, a thing he was seldom able to do in these last days. He made an important change in the officers of the community, and that evening he appeared for the last time in choir. He entered the church in the purple cappa magna granted him in 1929 by Pius XI, on the occasion of his golden jubilee as a priest. During the second Vespers of the great feast he sat in the choir of the infirm but stepped into his stall to give the blessing after the benedicamus Domino. Then he remained to chant the Vespers of the Dead for the solemn anniversary of All Souls.

  Two weeks later he received Extreme Unction, in his room, from the hands of the prior. He managed to live until Christmas and into the new year, but when the monks were entering choir for Prime at five-thirty on the morning of January 4, the prior beckoned them to come quickly to the abbot’s room.

  The great man died with his monks around him, reciting the prayers for the agonizing.

  Many of the Church dignitaries who had applauded Dom Edmond’s wit at the Triple Jubilee banquet were once again at Gethsemani on the cold, rainy, January day when his body was lowered into the earth in a nook behind the chapel of Our Lady of Victories, in the apse of the abbey church where he had usually said Mass.

  While the eddies of excitement were dying down in the Catholic press of two continents, the monks of Gethsemani prepared for the election of their fifth abbot. Early in February Dom Corentin Guyader, the father immediate, arrived from Melleray, and the vote was taken with all the prescribed formalities. Not much balloting was required to choose as their new superior for life the man who had been Dom Edmond’s prior for over thirty years.

  Dom Frederic Dunne was the first American to become a Trappist abbot. He was also, incidentally, the first American who came to Gethsemani as a choir monk and actually stayed there until death. In doing so, he buried many others who had entered the novitiate after him. Before his own life ended, full of years and merits, on August 4, 1948, he not only had seen more than half of Gethsemani’s hundred years but had played a dominant part in his half of the abbey’s history.

  Dom Frederic had entered the monastery in 1894, when he was twenty. Physically speaking, he was not a very promising prospect: his build was slight, he was not tall or muscular. Dom Edward, who was then abbot, recognized at once the intelligence and religious fervor of his new postulant, who described himself in t
he monastery records as a printer and bookbinder. That was the trade his father had exercised, first in Zanesville and Ironton, Ohio, then in Atlanta, Georgia, and Jacksonville, Florida. While Frater Frederic was still a young monk, his father followed him to Gethsemani and spent the last years of his life in the habit of a lay-brother oblate. Mr. Dunne brought with him a small hand printing press and some type and everything needed to bind a book. During the course of his long and extremely busy monastic career, Father Frederic found time to bind many of the books in the library.

  “Busy” is scarcely the word for his life. Dom Frederic’s labors for the monastery were something monumental. The natural generosity of his soul and the intense nervous energy generated in his wiry frame are not sufficient to explain the persistence and the effectiveness with which he kept Gethsemani going, sometimes single handed, for so many years.

  He entered the monastery at a crucial moment. The monks, ignorant of the English language or of the ways of the world, or both, and divided among themselves in a community that was unbalanced and ill at ease, were closer to ruin than they realized. Dom Edward quickly discerned the blessing that had come to his monastery in this intelligent and willing worker: and it did not take him long to make use of him. He put Frater Frederic to work long before he should have done so. Even before the poor boy got well into his novitiate, he was appointed sacristan: and then he was barely professed when the whole house was turned upside down by the trouble at Gethsemani College, the public scandal surrounding the arrest of the principal, Dom Edward’s resignation, and the confusion that followed.

  It was young Frater Frederic who was sent up to the school to take charge of everything, to go over the books, to find out how much the ex-principal had managed to embezzle, and afterward to set things right and try to steer the school back into the proper spiritual and financial channels. It was not a bad assignment for a boy of twenty-two. But it was one that had its dangers. After all, the young monk was taken out of the community before he was fully formed. He had to live at the college, and he came down to the monastery only at rare intervals. He was a contemplative only in desire. The fact that he managed to preserve such an intense and ardent interior life all that time bears witness to the fervor and power of that desire! For, although he was at the same time one of the youngest and most overworked men in the house, Frater Frederic was also one of the most spiritual.

  Underlying a natural courage and tenacity that could be pushed to the limits of heroism by his iron will, Frater Frederic burned with deep and smoldering supernatural fires, and his was the union of grace and temperament that produces Trappist saints. He was a Trappist in all the rigor of his love for the Rule, in all his uncompromising asceticism and love of penance: but he was more than Trappist in his ardent love of Christ, a love that had something of the fire of St. Bernard and St. Gertrude the Great. This love was the supernatural secret of his tireless devotion to Gethsemani and to all who have lived there in the last fifty years or have come within the radius of the Trappists’ influence. And beyond that, his love went out to embrace the whole world, for this contemplative, like St. Theresa of Avila, like Thérèse of Lisieux, had the soul of a great apostle.

  All his life was centered upon the altar and Christ in the tabernacle. The Blessed Sacrament, the Sacred Heart were his contemplation: if his thoughts turned at every moment from his work to Christ on the Cross, it was only to return again to this unending immolation of work which was to consume his life in sacrifice. Father Frederic loved books and he loved prayer. He had no relish for society and for the business and functions of men. Perhaps few people ever realized how much it cost him to sacrifice so many hours and days in his long life to material things, to contact with the world, to conversations with visitors, and to errands outside the monastery.

  Dom Edmond, of course, had found him invaluable. He had him ordained as fast as he decently could and appointed him prior. After that, during Dom Edmond’s long absences in Europe, Africa, and Asia, it was Father Frederic who ran things at Gethsemani. Quietly, efficiently, without fuss or noise, submitting everything he could to the judgment of his abbot, Father Frederic found the secret of doing many jobs extremely well—and letting all the credit go to somebody else.

  By the time he was elected abbot, he was thoroughly prepared to be not only abbot but everything else: all during his abbotship Dom Frederic carried out most of the functions of cellarer as well. Here again, it was a question of generous sacrifice. He knew how much it cost to go out and do business in the world, and he wanted to spare any one of his monks from such a trial.

  The first American-born Cistercian abbot entered upon his new charge in an hour of severe trials; the Providence of God was evidently preparing him and his community for the years of hard work and expansion that were soon to come. On February 7, the day after Dom Frederic Dunne’s election, several members of the community who had fallen ill with Spanish influenza had to be isolated. In spite of all the efforts of the local doctor, the contagion spread rapidly through the community. In a few days Father James Fox, the infirmarian, had half the community on his hands in the small monastic infirmary built years before by Dom Edmond. But the monks did not realize the danger of the situation until Father Columban and Brother Placid both died on February 15. While they were being buried on the 16th, Father Anselm died, an eighty-six-year-old Irish monk. More and more of the Trappists fell ill until finally only twenty were left standing to carry on the regular life of the community and look after the others. The infirmary was taking on some of the aspects of a pesthouse, and there seemed to be nothing anyone could do about it. Father Anthony died on the 18th, followed by Brother Michael two days later. By this time the news of the epidemic was all over the countryside, and it was Bishop Floersh in Louisville who finally brought relief to Gethsemani. He appealed to Chicago for help, and two Alexian brothers were sent at once to Kentucky from their Chicago hospital to nurse the sick Trappists. Meanwhile, the monks were moved out of the infirmary into the top floor of the guest house, where the disease was finally checked, with the loss of one more patient, Brother Matthias. Later on, two more died of pneumonia.

  The Requiem Masses were sung over the bodies of all these victims by Dom Corentin—a sad task for a father immediate who had come to install a new abbot in his daughter house. For, while all this was going on, the regular visitation was also being held, and confirmation of the election arrived from Cîteaux. Those who were able to get around on February 18 knelt before their new reverend father in the chapter room and renewed their vows, promising him obedience until death.

  However, weeks went by, and the monks were able to finish Lent in the usual rigor. May 1 saw the abbatial blessing of the new superior, and that September he attended his first General Chapter. By November the community entered full swing upon the new program of works that had to be undertaken and began excavating a cellar under the monumental, thick-walled east wing of the abbey, built three-quarters of a century before by the pioneers.

  Behind the peaceful walls of the Kentucky abbey, no one thought much of the events that were beginning to cause a stir in the newspapers as the year 1936 progressed. Only a rumor reached the Trappists that the February elections in Spain had put in power a regime under which the Church began to feel the pressure of a savage persecution. In the summer it was heard that Spain was on fire with civil war.

  Cistercians don’t know anything about politics and they did not become much involved in the confusions that clouded the minds of so many others in America. They did not realize that what was taking shape in Spain was really the prelude to a vast international conflict, a new world war on a scale more extensive and more terrible than anything that had ever been known before. They did not hear how the armies and air forces of Italy and Germany on one side and of the Communist International on the other were making this Spanish Civil War a field of maneuvers, a practice campaign before the real thing began. But what they did hear was that thousands of priests and religious
were being taken out and killed and that churches and monasteries were being burned.

  And so, even though they did not understand politics, these monks grasped one fundamental truth about the Spanish Civil War: that it was essentially religious. The various twentieth-century religions had come to be badly mixed up, but in this conflict—with Fascism and Nazism on one side, and with Communism on the other—it was still essentially a war of modern godlessness against God and against the Catholic Church. That some of the Church’s worst enemies happened, for the time being, to be fighting on Franco’s side may have obscured the issue but did nothing to change the fact. At the same time the claims of a tolerant “liberalism,” which theoretically hoped for religious freedom under the Popular Front, did not alter the facts. Therefore, in practice, the Cistercian monasteries in Nationalist Spain were not molested. The only one that had the misfortune to be stranded in the province of Santander, controlled by the Popular Front, suffered the fate that was to be expected.

  Our Lady of Viaceli had been built in 1901 as a house of refuge for the southern French monastery of Our Lady of the Desert, near Toulouse. It was another child of the Waldeck-Rousseau anti-Catholic legislation in France. In the thirty-five years of its existence the community had done quite well for itself and had made a foundation in the province of Soria, Santa Maria de Huerta.

  After the February elections of 1936 the monks of Viaceli began to hear of churches being burned in their province, but they were not visited by the F.A.I. until after the July uprising. First of all, they were “investigated.” That is to say, groups of Reds walked in and started pushing them around with rifles and revolvers and asking them questions, as if to give a semijudicial character to the plunder of provisions and the stealing of livestock that were to follow.