The Waters of Siloe

by Thomas Merton

  Mount Melleray is one abbey that has had even more trouble than Gethsemani in housing all the postulants that have come there. Many of its monks have been shunted off to New Mellifont, making that young community one of the large ones in the Order, with sixty monks or so. It is already nearly as big as Gethsemani was, fifteen years ago.

  After celebrating its centenary in 1932, Mount Melleray started to build a new abbatial church. Today, the wide valley where the abbey stands is dominated by the square stone tower of a building whose proportions recall the great days of Fountains and Rievaulx in England. The church is worthy of the abbey itself, which is one of the only Cistercian monasteries in the modern world that plays the same kind of role, in the nation where it stands, as did the abbeys of the twelfth century in England and France and Italy and Germany and Belgium and Spain. Mount Melleray can say without exaggeration that it is the Clairvaux of twentieth-century Eire.

  In democratic America, abbots prudently refrain from translating the “Dom” in front of their name to its English equivalent of “Lord.” In England and Ireland the abbots are Lord abbots (Dom’ni abbates). In England it is a title. In Ireland it is something more of a fact. The abbots of Mount Melleray and Mount Saint Joseph count for something in the life of their state. And when one of them learned that his distant daughter house in Iowa had lost its abbot, a world war and an ocean full of U-boats over which all normal communication had been interrupted did not make him hang his hands in despair. He crossed to America on a troopship to preside at the election of a successor.

  Meanwhile, at Gethsemani, the date August 14, 1945, found a community that still enjoyed most of the elbowroom that was left by the Georgia pioneers. A few postulants had come, no doubt: priests and men who were not eligible for the army. But also, from time to time, the father abbot had taken someone or other away with him on his overnight trips to Our Lady of the Holy Ghost to swell the ranks of the founders there.

  When the monks came in from the cornfields of the Kentucky abbey on that August day, the Vigil of the Assumption, they did not find it hard to guess why the distillery whistle a mile or so down the road was blowing with such insistent continuity. Their abbot had told them in chapter some days before that strange things had happened in Japan which made an armistice almost certain. Now they surmised that it had come. And when the distillery whistle went on blowing and blowing—for one hour and then two and then three—and finally went off into a staccato and hiccuplike series of toots at nightfall, they became morally certain that the fighting had stopped.

  But perhaps they did not realize just what that would mean for them.

  It took a month or two for the invasion of Gethsemani to begin. But during the late fall of 1945 and the winter of 1946 soldiers were arriving. Men who had fought in the campaigns of North Africa and Italy, men who had seen service in the Pacific or who had crossed the Channel and pressed into Normandy and on toward Paris and then to the Rhine, now came tugging on the bell rope of this silent, lonely Kentucky monastery. Most of them were still in uniform. Soon the choir stalls that had been left vacant by the Georgia foundation were all filled, and more besides. The shortage of huge folio antiphoners and psalters had long ago become acute: now it was overwhelming. For a time they had tried to keep up with the new arrivals by setting someone hastily to copy the antiphons and responsories into manuscript tomes. But that was not enough. In the end some of the novices had to do without books altogether and try to follow the office in breviaries.

  By the end of 1946 the community was bigger than it had ever been before; it was rapidly approaching one hundred and seventy. A new foundation was inevitable. But Dom Frederic had seen it coming and was already preparing the way.

  There were several offers from bishops in different parts of the country, but the one that most appealed to the abbot of Gethsemani came from Salt Lake City: a huge diocese in area, with a few scattered parishes and missions and a handful of religious communities. It sounded like a spiritual desert. When he traveled west and saw those high, arid mountains and scanned the bare walls of the valleys, Dom Frederic almost changed his mind. Monks have to live off the land, and they usually need timber and green pastures. Compared with Georgia and Kentucky, this forbidding landscape seemed almost impossible. But then his guides told him how extraordinarily rich was the soil of those valleys and what crops grew from the fields when they were irrigated: and finally he came upon a ranch which seemed to have been created for contemplative monks.

  Eighteen miles east of Ogden, after a long climb through Ogden Canyon, the valley opened out into a mile-wide bowl between mountains. The clean air of high altitudes breathed silently over those fields. Not a house was in sight. The snowy ridge of Mount Ogden stood up stark against the sky, as if it were the sentinel of this wilderness. Eastward was a no man’s land of snow and sagebrush, and there were deer tracks in the snow. There were sixteen hundred acres of land with good springs. More water was available from the Ogden River nearby. A handful of water-right shares came with the land. There were some cattle on it, and the next year would yield some fair-sized crops of wheat and alfalfa. Transforming this desolate, houseless ranch into a Cistercian monastery and farm would be an immense amount of work: but the very silence of the place cried out for Trappists.

  The deeds for the purchase of the ranch had been entered in the records of Weber County, Utah, March 4, 1947. The monks expected, at first, to start west at the end of April, on the feast of St. Robert of Molesme. Next, they hoped to be there by Trinity Sunday, at the beginning of June: a most appropriate time, since the new house was to be called Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity. But Trinity Sunday came and went and the alfalfa was growing higher in the Ogden Valley and the wheat was shooting forth green ears. However, there was no danger of losing the crop, because a neighbor had agreed to harvest it for them in exchange for a share in the returns.

  Housing was the biggest problem. Contracts had been made for a complete monastery of metal Quonset huts, but the job was too complicated to be finished overnight. By June everybody realized that, if they waited for the huts to go up, they might not get to Utah before the fall.

  So, Gethsemani’s father abbot decided to buy some army barracks from an abandoned camp near Ogden. They could be transported cheaply and without trouble, and the monks could move in at once.

  The second colony set out from Gethsemani at nightfall, as the first group had done. It was a larger colony, thirty-four in all. Also, they were younger. Eleven were novices, most of them fresh from the army. Twelve of the professed monks and brothers had been in the Order less than six years. However, this group had formed around a solid nucleus of veteran monks and lay brothers, and those who were left behind in the mother abbey felt that they had lost the pick of Gethsemani’s men.

  That magnificent mountain valley deserved the best Cistercians that America could give. It was a comfort to think of this body of select men, vigorous, happy, already steeped in the Cistercian contemplative spirit, austere without being narrow, silent without being morose, prayerful and full of joy, journeying toward the providential work that God had destined for them from all eternity.

  It was a happy foundation from the very start. The colony left Gethsemani on the evening of July 7 and arrived in Ogden Valley in the early afternoon of the 10th. It was just about two weeks before the hundredth anniversary of Brigham Young’s arrival in Utah with the first Mormons.

  The monks had come up through the Ogden Canyon in a chartered bus. A couple of miles beyond the town of Huntsville they found themselves at the head of the valley, on the land that was to be their home. All around them in the wide fields were bales of alfalfa, waiting to be carted off by buyers. The snow on the summit of Mount Ogden reminded them that they had come a long way from Kentucky. They could see where the foundations of the “Quonset” monastery had been dug, but there was still no sign of a building. What was worse, they had been told at the station in Ogden that only part of their barracks had arrived.
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  It took about a month for the colony to get settled—a month of confusion and hardship. The day after they arrived they had been up and about their business for several hours, when they saw the rest of their barracks come lumbering up the dusty road on trailers. They set to work at once, preparing the way for a reunion of the dismembered huts, which turned out to have served as prisons in a cantonment of German and Italian war prisoners. There were still various crude works of art on the walls of the barracks—pictures of mountain scenery, German proverbs, and even one inelegant painting of a stein of beer and a set of dice, which contributed absolutely nothing to the perfection of Trappist recollection.

  About noon somebody looked up and discerned another solitary traveler coming slowly up their road. He was pedaling a bicycle. And he was certainly heading for the monastery, because there was nowhere else to go on those broad, treeless acres.

  It was their first postulant. He had come from New York, but not on a bicycle: he had bought that in Ogden, because it was the surest way of covering the last, transportationless eighteen miles up the canyon to where the monks were. He certified his determination to stay there by selling the bicycle to one of the Mormon carpenters who were helping the monks to get under cover. The proceeds from the sale went into the practically empty treasury of the new foundation. The carpenter took the bicycle home and gave it to his son.

  For the first three or four weeks the hours of work were long and the hours of prayer were mixed up and the hours of reading were more or less abstract and the hours for sitting around and taking things easy were nonexistent. (But then, idle hours never exist in a Trappist monastery, anyway.) Above all, the monks were short of food. There was plenty of alfalfa on the property but not much else, and monks have not yet learned to eat alfalfa. It was due only to the generosity of their friends—especially the Benedictine nuns at the hospital in Ogden—that they got anything to eat at all. And it took a long time to assemble the barracks in a way that was completely satisfying. As a climax to everything, the secular carpenters and electricians who were helping them went off to celebrate the centenary of Brigham Young’s arrival. But at last the monks were settled in their home and were able to keep the usages as they were written—all the canonical hours and meals and intervals at their proper time of day and no more work than was prescribed by the Constitutions.

  By that time, those who had made themselves sick by working too hard in the hot sun and at that unfamiliar altitude had got used to their surroundings: and a dealer from Ogden bought the alfalfa for a good sum of money and took it away.

  Now at last they slipped back into the old, harmonious, wise round of the monastic day with its beautiful balance of prayer and study and meditation and manual labor: and now they felt themselves beginning to grow into the soil of this valley—which they were even now flooding with water to get another crop of hay. They watched the clouds gather around the crest of Mount Ogden. They saw the storms travel down over the mountains. They listened to the deep, intense silence of their valley, a mile above sea level and a thousand feet above Ogden. Hardly a sound was to be heard except the momentary song of a meadow lark as it perched for a few moments on a fence post. Toward evening they would hear the coyotes on the mountainside serenading the solemn rising of the moon. The only thing that reminded them at all of the world beyond their valley was the drone of the mailplanes that went over at regular intervals during the day. It turned out that a radio-beam sending station had been built on a corner of the monks’ ground.

  But most of the time the silence was so complete that if you stood still you could almost feel it seeping into your blood and bones. As the sun went down, canonizing the stark mountain with a great blaze of blood, filling the utterly clean sky with streamers of delicate fire and saffron interwoven with aquamarine, it was easy to settle into the deep recollection of the contemplative, and let yourself be flooded, from within the secret depths of your own being, with the powerful sweetness of the presence of God. . . .

  The very landscape was Cistercian, stripped of nonessentials, rugged and austere and simple, with no irrelevant details to arrest the eye. In the middle of it all, the workmen were now putting up the steel framework for the curious quartet of metal igloos that would be their home for perhaps twenty years to come. There was nothing in the Quonsets to remind anyone of the harmonious and simple Cistercian churches of the twelfth century: but here, too, were buildings completely functional and without frills.

  Barns and a hay shed and a garage and various shops sprang up and formed a straggling village around the barracks. By fall, when the snow line crept down the hills and closed in on them from day to day, the valley had changed its character altogether.

  By that time some more postulants had come, and the overcrowding which they had left Gethsemani to avoid was once again upon them with a vengeance. They overflowed from their barrack-dormitory and found sleeping quarters where they could: some in the guest department, others in the various shops. One young monk, a lover of sleep and warmth, established himself in the hut which had been allotted to the little chicks and was kept at a constant temperature of eighty degrees. . . .

  They would not be in the Quonsets that winter. When the snows came, the metal walls and roofing were not yet finished, and it would not be possible to pour any more cement for the floors, now that the freeze had come. But the barracks were well warmed.

  The silent little monastery entered snugly upon a new year, 1948, with forty-one members inside its walls, all thinking of the things that remained to be done: of the gardens and orchards that were to come, of the cattle and the sheep that would graze on that mountainside. And then one day there would be a Cistercian monastery of stone, an abbey church worthy of their liturgy.

  These first few months had proved one thing: Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity was turning out to be one of the most successful foundations the Order had made in modern times, materially and spiritually.

  But these are things that have to be paid for.

  The price of the Utah foundation was something more than a drain on the finances of the mother house.

  A religious order is a body, or rather a unified organism, belonging to the Mystical Body of the one Christ. It is a church in miniature. Its life reproduces the life of the whole Mystical Body. It functions according to the same laws.

  As with a plant full of vital sap and fruitfulness, when one branch is cut back another one springs forth. And Providence had destined this vigorous, budding new shoot in the arid Wasatch range to replace another branch that had been brutally slashed from the tree in another part of the world.

  It seems strange that the monks should have left Gethsemani and traveled to Utah on the precise days when they did. We have already remarked that they should have started much earlier in the spring.

  A few months later, news from China made the ways of Providence come clear.

  On the morning of July 8, 1947, while the Utah-bound Cistercian colonists were waiting for a connection in the St. Louis station, their car was shunted onto a siding where, by virtue of an indult from the Apostolic Delegate, they offered Mass on a portable altar and all received Communion. It was the first conventual Mass of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity.

  That same day saw the last Masses offered in the monastery of Our Lady of Consolation at Yang Kia Ping, in the mountains of North China.

  This famous monastery—the first one of the Order in China and the largest in the Far East—had been made known to the whole Catholic world when Pope Pius XI singled it out for mention in his encyclical Rerum Ecclesiae. Speaking of the need for contemplative monks to support the active clergy in mission countries by their prayers and example, the Pope commented:

  In this connection we have in mind the great monastery founded by the Reformed Cistercians of La Trappe in the Vicariate Apostolic of Peking, in which nearly a hundred monks, most of whom are Chinese, devote themselves to the practice of the most perfect virtues, to constant prayer, and by their
austere life and hard labor gain the favor of God for themselves and for those who have not the faith, while at the same time their example draws these latter to Christ.2

  The idea of a contemplative monastery in China went back to the middle of the nineteenth century. For years Monsignor Delaplace, the Vicar Apostolic of Peking, had been trying to find some enclosed order to make a foundation in his territory. Three Carmelite nuns from Bayonne, in southern France, had started on the journey but turned back at Marseilles. Finally, in 1883, the offer was accepted by the lonely little Cistercian abbey of Tamie, lost in the high Alps of Savoie. One lone monk, Dom Ephrem, set out to prepare the way for a colony. The land that had been offered them, he found wilder than the Alps he had left behind. In the lofty mountains of North China, the site of the monastery was a deep, stony valley surrounded by barren peaks. Only in a Chinese painting would he have expected to see such fantastic contours. Loud with waterfalls, the abrupt, jagged hills were wounded by ravines. Dom Ephrem and his Trappists were supposed to grub a living out of them, somehow. After they cleared the rocky soil of its dwarf oak trees, small pines, and wild rhododendrons, they would be able to grow a little millet and some oats. There would be no clover, no rice, no wheat, and very little corn. However, the valley did have one virtue: it was full of apricot trees. In the springtime, when they came out in bloom, they transformed the ravines into Edens of soft color. They grew all by themselves, needed little care, and gave plenty of fruit. But what was most valuable was not the apricots themselves so much as the kernel of their stones, which yielded an oil of a certain market value.