The Waters of Siloe

by Thomas Merton

  On December 8, 1943, as the pontifical High Mass for the feast of the Immaculate Conception was ending, officers of the Gestapo presented themselves at the abbey of Our Lady of the Dombes, near Lyons, with a demand for their cellarer, Father Bernard. They had to wait for him to unvest, because he had served in the sanctuary as assistant priest during the Mass. Then they led him off immediately to Lyons.

  The monk had been denounced because of his contacts with resistance elements, and his captors did not neglect to put him through their most expert treatment in their attempts to get something out of him. Failing in this, they sent him, already half dead, to Compiegne, whence he passed successively to concentration camps at Weimar, Nordhausen, and Belsen-Bergen—where he finally succumbed. Although he died for his country rather than for his faith, nevertheless the courage and supernatural patience and charity with which he suffered all these things made a tremendous impression on his fellow prisoners. When the news of his death was heard, all the villages and small towns in the neighborhood of his monastery held memorial services, which were packed not only with Catholics but with men of every shade of belief or no belief at all. Meanwhile, the abbey of the Dombes had acquired a very unsavory reputation with the Gestapo, and in 1944 about a hundred Nazi military police and other soldiers broke into the house and put on one of their typical displays of violence. Having first beaten up some of the monks, they lined the entire community up against a wall and kept them there for three hours with their hands up, facing a battery of machine guns. Meanwhile, the abbot was subjected to questioning. He could not understand one tenth of the words that were screamed into his face through a welter of half-French, half-German abuse and profanity. The search of the house having yielded no results, the SS suddenly left, taking with them a few prisoners who eventually came home safely.

  Other houses in France, while not subjected to deliberate maltreatment, at least suffered intense inconvenience from the Germans. One day, for instance, the monks of Bricquebec, in Normandy, came out of choir after Prime to discover that their front courtyard was occupied by thirty-nine German army trucks filled with soldiers, who were busy shaving to the tune of radios turned on full blast. They had no intention of bothering the monks: all they wanted was the monastery. The father abbot, in his turn, had stated his position quite definitely: “We won’t leave, even if we have to sleep under the apple trees.” They did not get that far. The Nazis left them a cellar and their church. To get from the cellar to the church, they had to go around the outside of the buildings and enter their choir through a hole in the wall, as the cloister was occupied by their guests. On rainy days the offices met with considerable competition from the soldiers drilling in the cloister, the roaring of the Nazi sergeants and the crash of rifle butts on the stone floor where monks were accustomed to pace up and down in silent meditation! When the sun came out the visitors disposed themselves comfortably on the roofs of the cloister or in the grass of the cemetery and exposed their pink Nordic nakedness to the warm rays.

  But in a few weeks, when the Allied drive began, Bricquebec was turned into a hospital. The refectory became an operating room, where three surgeons were busy day and night. Doubtless it was the red crosses on the roofs that saved the monastery from being wiped out altogether. It lay directly in the path of the advance from Cherbourg and was in the midst of the fighting in Normandy.

  Chimay, too, was turned out of doors by the Germans. This time the Luftwaffe wanted the abbey as a base and listening post. Dom Anselme le Bail and his community packed up their belongings and moved in with the Christian Brothers in a nearby town. There they remained for two years, until the American troops arrived and liberated the region. All that time, the Rule was kept faithfully, all the choral offices went on as usual, and the life of a Cistercian monastery was uninterrupted in its essentials. In fact, Dom Anselme was working diligently on the Cistercian writers of the twelfth century to produce a manual of spiritual theology for his young monks. An indult from the Holy See even allowed them to receive novices. They were bothered by the Gestapo, who arrested some of the monks but afterward let them go.

  Some of the houses in Belgium and Holland were under more of a strain. The activities of the Gestapo in those parts were under the direction of an apostate priest, a former member of a religious order. With the peculiar psychology such people sometimes have, he concentrated his attention on the religious orders—no doubt to try and satisfy some obscure and torturing sense of inferiority—in other words, to make priests and religious pay for the suffering his own stifled conscience was still causing him. . . .

  He saw to it that the Trappists of two monasteries, Echt and Achel, were expelled. The former house, near Limburg, was turned into a school for the Hitler Youth and remained so until 1945, when the Allies arrived. When the monks returned, they found nothing but a gutted building. The Nazis had not even left them a wooden spoon.

  Meanwhile, the apostate turned his steps to the big Dutch abbey of Koeningshoeven, at Tilburg. However, he was in a good mood that day and somehow took a fancy to the Cistercians. Finding nothing to object to, he covered his departure with some heavy clowning, saluted the first superior with “Ave, abbas illustrissime” and asked the brother at the gate to pray for him, because he was a poor sinner.

  Before that, however, Koeningshoeven had had a more bitter taste of Nazi methods. In August, 1942, toward three o’clock in the morning, when the monks were singing the night office, the Gestapo arrived and demanded two fathers and a lay brother who were converted Jews. All three were blood brothers: Fathers Ignatius and Nivard and Brother Linus Loeb. Their two sisters, Mothers Hedwig and Theresa Loeb, were Cistercian nuns in the convent of Berkel. They, too, were arrested, along with another Jewish convert, an extern sister who had been a doctor of medicine in the world. Nothing was heard of them for a long time, until at last word was received, in a roundabout way, that the three Trappists had been shot in Poland on the Feast of Pentecost, 1943. The others vanished without a trace.

  It was when the Allies landed on the Continent and began to drive the Nazis back into Germany that the real martyrdom of some of our monasteries began. Perhaps no house in the Order suffered so much as Tegelen, near Venlo, Holland, not far from the Meuse. Half the house was occupied by German soldiers from the first days of the Nazi invasion. There was an airfield nearby, as well as other military objectives. Month after month, year after year, the monks were in constant dread of raids by the R.A.F., and they spent many nights in the crypt of the church, trying to recite Matins while bombs thundered all around them.

  In Holy Week, 1943, the monastery caught fire and three wings burned down, together with some of the barns. Nevertheless, the monks stayed on in what remained, along with refugees from Achel and Echt. It was community life with a vengeance! Things got worse with the frequent bombardments of Venlo in 1944. Upward of three hundred civilian refugees found shelter in the monastery. The meager provisions of the monks, shared out among this crowd, were just enough to keep them all alive. In November the Allied forces drew near and then were held in check at the Meuse—just close enough for the monastery to be in the path of a ceaseless artillery fire aimed over their roofs at the Germans behind them. The British gunners unloaded tons of ammunition on the Nazis, sometimes at the rate of sixty thousand shells a day. The monks and refugees, reduced to a state of famine, were living underground. The monastery was struck by shells in several places. One day, just after dinner, a pursuit bomber swooped down and riddled the empty refectory with bullets. The monks were taking what was euphemistically called a “siesta” at that particular moment.

  When the Americans finally took Venlo, the monks were so far gone that they could not believe that deliverance had finally arrived. It was a few days before all the guns were silent, and only then did the truth begin to sink in.

  Tegelen had had five full years of war. Yet, Our Lady of Refuge, at Zundert, Holland, had five quiet years in which the life of prayer was not interrupted for a min
ute. One monk was called to the army—an Austrian priest who returned safely to his cloister, “more of a Trappist than ever.” For the rest, the only excitement was caused by a bomb falling on one of the barns. The monks scarcely saw a German uniform all that time, and they did not contribute a single member to the forced-labor gangs which were so busily conscripted from Belgium and Holland and France in those days.

  The monasteries in Alsace got the war in two doses; it blundered through their territory, then came back again. The nuns of Ubexy had some narrow escapes in the first round and were forced underground when the fighting returned their way in 1944. Many refugees crowded to the convent. There were some bad scares but nobody was hurt.

  The big abbey of Oelenberg, which had been destroyed in World War I and rebuilt afterward, was once again destroyed at the end of World War II. The French troops had pressed as far as the neighborhood of the abbey in November, 1944, when the Nazis established an observation post in the church tower. For about a month, beginning in December, the French had to subject the post to artillery fire. The barns and harvest were destroyed and the church was riddled with shells; all the farm machinery was destroyed, and the Germans, before leaving, killed all the livestock and left the monks with a farm full of mines on which to try and raise themselves something to eat. . . .

  Nevertheless, 1944 was a glad year for the Cistercians of the Strict Observance in all parts of Europe. They can remember the happy day when the first American or British divisions began to move past their fields. Most of the communities in the actual area of fighting played host to Allied soldiers during the last stage of the war, with the result that many American laymen know the Trappist monasteries of Europe better than do the American Cistercians themselves.

  XI

  The Rising Tide: New Foundations in Georgia, Utah, and New Mexico; The Last Mass at Yang Kia Ping

  BY THE year 1943 the Trappist protoabbey of the Americas, Our Lady of Gethsemani, was in many ways a different place from the house Dom Edmond Obrecht had left behind him when he went into eternity eight years before. To begin with, it even looked different. True, the monastery itself was still the gray, rugged quadrangle of buildings that brooded among the trees, its silver spire lifting up a huge cross to the Kentucky sky. But it was surrounded by shiny new barns and chicken houses and a hundred-and-sixty-foot water tower. That tower had given the whole place a new character. It did not make the landscape more beautiful. To recapture the European air the old monastery had preserved from the time of its foundation, you had to avoid looking at the water tower. And that was hard to do. But that water tank had had a rejuvenating effect. It made the place look more alert, more American, even though a trifle more grim than before.

  When a high concrete retaining wall was put up behind the old monastery and a two-story brick wing added, jutting out pugnaciously on this new parapet, to dominate the night pasture and the mill and the creek, Gethsemani took on all the appearance of an armed camp. And it became very difficult indeed, in these years of war and revolution, to look at the place without realizing, at least vaguely, that Gethsemani too was stripped for action in its own war—the gigantic struggle of spiritual forces which is too superhuman for us to understand but which underlies all human history, and especially the history of our time.

  It was no doubt because Dom Frederic Dunne and his monks were so keenly attuned to the reality of this spiritual struggle that the abbey took on the grim color of their own hard labor—the quick, almost desperate labor of men who are rearing a barricade against a fast-approaching army. A spirit of energy and rugged, austere joy in the teeth of a cosmic tragedy: that was the temper of Dom Frederic Dunne and of Gethsemani in the years when the world of unbelieving materialism began to fall visibly to pieces around them.

  Dom Frederic’s view of life was at once tragic and optimistic. It was optimistic because the central reality of his life—a reality more real than anything else—was God’s infinite love and mercy to men. It was also tragic, because he experienced, with an anguish so acute that it was physical, the terrible truth that most men have rejected that love and have preferred the confusion and misery of their own selfish ends—the fruit of which is suffering, cruelty, hatred, and war. Dom Frederic’s view of life could not help being tragic, considering the tragic times in which he lived. But it could not help being optimistic, since he had consecrated his whole existence to a belief whose essential optimism finds the love of God in all things, even the worst, and keeps reminding us that the love of God turns evil into good. Omnia cooperantur in bonum iis qui diligunt Deum.1

  The fruit of this combination of tragedy and optimism was a life of strenuous effort, in which Dom Frederic dedicated himself entirely to the task of opposing evil with good, hatred with love, selfishness with sacrifice, and sin with reparation. His conception of the Cistercian life was dominated by this reparatory character, and the necessity of vicarious penance was to become, at last, almost the sole theme of his spiritual instructions. Although he was essentially a modest and retiring person, hating every form of fuss or excitement, Dom Frederic Dunne would positively blaze with emotion when he talked about the life of the monk Christo cruci confixus, nailed to the Cross with Christ—filling up in his own body the things that are lacking to the sufferings of the Christus totus.

  Although he hated to leave the enclosure of the monastery and never stayed out a moment longer than was absolutely necessary, he had a very clear picture of the needs of the Church in America. In the years of depression and war the correspondence of the abbot of Gethsemani grew to tremendous proportions. Many people—priests and laymen—were writing to the monks to tell them how abjectly miserable life in the world had become and to ask for a share in their penances and prayers. When he had first entered the monastery, fifty years before, Dom Frederic Dunne had found few to sympathize with him in his intense conviction of the important role of contemplative orders in the Church. In fifty years there had been a considerable change, and even men who were not Catholics were beginning to realize that prayer and penance might perhaps be more fundamental and more valuable to the Church and to the whole world than the exterior labors of the apostolate.

  In any case, this first American Trappist abbot had shouldered a task of tremendous importance and vast possibilities.

  The first thing he had done, on taking over the miter and crozier of his predecessor, was to make sure that all the austerities of the Rule and the Cistercian usages were observed as fully as possible at Gethsemani. The Kentucky abbey had always been one of the most austere in the Order, in any case, and Dom Edmond Obrecht had certainly not allowed any mitigations which he did not feel were amply justified by the difficult climate. Dom Frederic Dunne began to retrench even upon these. Bit by bit and year by year the meals in the refectory dwindled down to their most rudimentary and naked essentials. The two fried eggs that had transformed each monk’s Easter Sunday dinner into a banquet of unusual splendor, were relentlessly banished. The somewhat larger portions of corn-meal mush or oatmeal that made the evening collation, in time of fast, somewhat less microscopic, dwindled gradually to a few ounces of applesauce with a chunk of black bread, according to the usages. Even the wine or cider which are universally permitted in the Order disappeared from the table at Gethsemani forever and gave place to a strange concoction made of barley or soybeans, which goes by the name of “coffee.”

  Far from resenting these changes, most of the monks were eager to see them intensified, and many went to Dom Frederic and pointed out that, in the old Cistercian usages of the twelfth century, there had been no such thing as collation at all: only one meal a day in time of fast, and no extras, not even a bite of dry bread in the twenty-four hours between dinners. To this, Dom Frederic answered that he would be delighted to keep the ancient fasts as soon as they were brought back into effect by the present General Chapter, with the approval of the Holy See. Until then, he would be content to enforce the strict observance of the usages now in force.

&
nbsp; One somehow felt that the bare refectory of Gethsemani was Dom Frederic’s pride. When he visited other houses and found their meals less austere, he would say softly, “We do not have that at Gethsemani.” And European abbots who visited Gethsemani arched their eyebrows at the rusty old tin cans in which the monks received their barley coffee, and they told one another that these rich Americans were certainly making an effort to practice poverty.

  Dom Frederic made short work of another peculiar custom that had been tolerated at Gethsemani since the old days: the use of snuff. Smoking had never been countenanced, except that Dom Edmond had felt he could permit himself an occasional cigar on his many journeys. But some of the old monks had supposed they could not get along without a little pinch of snuff once in a while. Dom Frederic gave the community a chance to try. The only trace of the custom that now remains is the existence of the numerous stone jars in which the snuff used to be imported from Holland. These are now distributed around the various altars in the church, and the servers of Mass empty the basins into them at the lavabo.

  Curiously enough, one of the immediate effects of Dom Frederic’s austerity was a considerable increase in vocations. He had not been abbot a year when the great multiplication of novices began. When they were asked why they had come to Gethsemani, most of them replied that they were looking for the hardest kind of monastic life. They wanted to strip themselves of everything, renounce all the pleasures and comforts of the world, in order to make some faint gesture, give some slight token of the fact that they were trying to love God. Many of them did not find the Trappist life austere enough. They had to be held in restraint, taught moderation. Their attention had to be directed to the searching interior asceticism of the will and judgment in perfect obedience, in Benedictine humility, in the acceptance, above all, of the mysterious and crucifying interior trials with which God purifies the souls of those whom He destines for infused contemplation. . . .