The Waters of Siloe

by Thomas Merton

  Mother Berchmans, whose interior life had been marked by nothing so much as her strong attraction to silence and prayer, now found herself deeply involved in all the activities and responsibilities and distracting cares of a new foundation. Under the strain of overwork her health began to collapse, and neither the climate of Japan nor anything else about the country appealed to her nature or agreed with her physical constitution. She had almost all the important jobs anyone can have in a Trappistine convent except that of prioress, and the last years of her life were taken up with the training of the first Japanese novices that came to Our Lady of the Angels—a task which demanded heroic sacrifice, as she was gradually dying of tuberculosis.

  But the crux of Mother Berchmans’s problem was not in having to exchange peaceful contemplation for activity and suffering and sickness. She wanted with her whole heart to accept the situation that was pointed out to her by God’s will. But the real source of her suffering lay in the fact that the only way she knew of accepting it did not seem to be the right one. She argued that the only thing to do was to force herself to like the things she hated. That was what it meant to be a “victim soul” and a saint: you proved your love for God by pushing your way blindly and by main force through every repugnance. That was what was called generosity. And the more hatred and disgust you felt for your lot, the more enthusiastically you told yourself that you liked it. And if you were generous, then everything would soon come easily. If it did not become easy, but remained just as hard and repugnant as before, that was your fault: it was all due to your weakness, to your tepidity. If you could not get to like sacrifice, it was because you were a coward. And if God did not give you grace to overcome your cowardice, it was because you were a sinner.

  So, the thing to do was to kneel down, day after day, and try to pull yourself apart and discover what it was that made you sin; to accuse yourself and humiliate yourself and lower yourself below all creatures into the dust and acknowledge what a miserable sinner you were. Then, maybe you would not be such a coward, and everything would be easy, everything would be wonderful; you would be able to make all those sacrifices without turning a hair, and you would soon have real evidence that you were a saint. . . .

  When Mother Berchmans had been in Japan a couple of years, she discovered that things did not work that way in the religious life.

  It was a thing that hundreds of monks and nuns have discovered before her time and since. She had run up against that same blank wall where, too often, monastic fervor lies down in despair; where monks wake up and find that they are mediocrities and can see nothing else to do but stay that way—or else go crazy.

  It was the same dead end toward which Joseph Cassant had headed with such zealous haste at the beginning of his novitiate, and from which he had been saved by a good director.

  But Mother Berchmans had to face the problem more or less alone. Her new confessor was a hardheaded, matter-of-fact person with a series of cut-and-dried solutions for all problems, and he did not give her much sympathy, because he was a very busy man: he had several convents on his hands, and he was a trifle suspicious of nuns, anyway. They had too many imaginary woes. He told her to be more generous. If she would only say, “Thy will be done,” and mean it, all her problems would be at an end.

  It was not her confessor or her superior or her sisters in the convent that saved this nun from giving up the struggle in disgust—or else driving herself out of her head from strain. It was a book. It was the same book that accomplished the merciful office of rescuing so many religious of that same generation. It was The Story of a Soul, the autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who was only just being discovered by the Church at large.

  In her simplicity, this Carmelite contemplative had not been afraid to start a quiet but extremely effective spiritual revolution all by herself in her cloister. With the serene confidence of one guided by the Holy Ghost, and without bothering to consider how her message would be disseminated through the world, she had set down on paper certain ideas of the spiritual life that were in conscious opposition to the kind of stereotyped rigorism that had been the fashion for several centuries. She was struggling against that current that still flowed through the Church bearing the pollution of a thinly disguised Jansenism: a formalistic spirit that set up many barriers between God and the souls of Christians. She was in complete reaction against systems of spirituality that placed inordinate emphasis upon sin and made people fix their attention on themselves and their own miserable souls and their own penances, instead of teaching them to believe in God’s love and trust His infinite mercy and allow themselves to be guided by His wise Providence.

  This message came to Mother Berchmans, in her little convent in Japan, as a liberation. At once the young Trappistine realized the futility of concentrating her attention on her own limited efforts and feeble strivings and failures in the spiritual life. There is only one thing that matters in religion, and that is love: not our love for God but, above all, God’s love for us. For if we try to give Him a love that has not first been given to us by Him, our love is nothing. Everything comes to us from Him and from His love.

  The aim of the spiritual life should be, therefore, not to keep us far from God, trying to placate His anger by an Egyptian slavery of penances, but to bring us close to Him, purifying our hearts by a perfect love that casts out all fear and consumes all desire for anything but God alone and, therefore, at the same time fills us with confidence in Him. “And we have known and have believed the love which God hath for us. . . . Fear is not in charity: but perfect charity casteth out fear, because fear hath pain. And he that feareth is not perfected in charity. Let us therefore love God, for God hath first loved us.”15

  Without realizing it, Mother Berchmans, in putting into practice the doctrine she read in the autobiography of the new Carmelite saint, had come very close to a truth which is at the very center of Cistercian mysticism: that confidence born of divine love is the secret of sanctity, as it is also the secret of contemplation. In the words of Etienne Gilson, concerning the theology of St. Bernard:

  This fiducia (confidence), offspring of charity, is an essential factor in St. Bernard’s doctrine. Penetrated with charity we become even in this world, in virtue of the gift, what God is in virtue of His Nature; and how then should we fear His judgment? . . . Hence we see why St. Bernard’s contemplation moves by way of consideration of the judgment, and how the precise point where the fear of Divine chastisement gives way to fiducia marks the entrance of the soul into ecstasy. We see also why, to put it more simply, the progress of love consists in the passage of a state in which a man is the slave to fear (servus) to another in which he purely and simply loves.16

  With this discovery, Mother Berchmans found that all her spiritual faculties were set free from the withering restrictions of formalism and reliance upon external practices and labors and penances, and were able to concentrate on the unum necessarium, the one all-important duty of the contemplative—to love God in all things and make everything contribute to His glory. And although the “confidence” of St. Thérèse of Lisieux might not be quite the same as St. Bernard’s fiducia, nevertheless the results in practice were very much alike. In reading the Little Flower, Mother Berchmans and her whole generation came much closer than they realized to St. Bernard and the first Cistercians.

  And so, love once again came to occupy the place of honor that belonged to it in the spirituality of Cîteaux.17

  It was after she reached this solution that Mother Berchmans first came under the more or less direct guidance of a Cistercian abbot who was to exercise a most powerful influence in the spiritual development of the Order after the reunion. Dom Vital Lehodey, as superior of Bricquebec, was also father immediate of most of the houses in the Far East and was consequently responsible for their regular visitation.

  Dom Lehodey, justly famous in the modern Church for two classical works—one on abandonment, Le Saint Abandon, and the other on mental prayer, Les Voie
s de l’Oraison Mentale18—was then at the height of his career. Perhaps no one in the Order was more keenly sensitive to the new development in spirituality, the ferment of new life that had begun to make itself so evident immediately after the reunion. Already profoundly versed in the secrets of contemplation and of contemplative souls, he learned from his contact with the many monks and nuns of the Order who acknowledged him as their spiritual father what the Holy Ghost was preparing for the Cistercian family. He was able at once to verify, in the soul of Mother Berchmans, the same movements, the same tendency toward a deeper and simpler and purer life of union with God that was beginning to burn high in so many other monasteries. He could detect the stirrings of infused contemplation—that vitally important element in the life of a contemplative order—which had been suffered to lie dormant or unrecognized at La Trappe. He was able, then, to give Mother Berchmans all the encouragement she needed to speed her along her course with serenity and courage and peace of heart.

  Already, at Bricquebec, Dom Vital had discovered this deep contemplation flourishing almost unheeded in some of his monks and brothers. There was Brother Candide Villemer, for instance, nearing the end of his forty years as a Trappist. The old brother had been one of those typically saintly Trappists, serving the monastery year after year in quiet and patient labor. First, he had learned the blacksmith’s trade from that champion of silence, Brother Abel, the one who worked with a hammer in one hand and a rosary in the other. Then he became the monastery miller for several years, and after that he passed on to the guest-house kitchen—a job that he had dreaded because he loved silence and seclusion and did not want to come in contact with outsiders, to whom he would be obliged to speak. He spent thirteen years in that employment. All through his religious life he had been remarkable only for his simplicity and quiet demeanor. He was one of those brothers who have absolutely nothing outwardly extraordinary about them—no special traits, no particular austerities, no remarkable devotions. He disappeared into the community. He achieved that perfect anonymity which belongs to the most unobtrusive member of a group of men. He spent much of his time in the church, motionless in prayer. Perhaps that was the only thing people wondered at: that perfect stillness, that deep, restful absorption. They did not realize that at those moments Brother Candide was in another world.

  Dom Vital discovered that this brother had had to suffer an obscure and terrible interior agony at the beginning of his religious life. He had entered upon the ways of mystical prayer in his first days in the monastery. He was perfectly simple and docile and did not have any elaborate notions of what was going on in his soul. He never thought of himself as a mystic, and perhaps the term “infused contemplation” was unknown to him. All he knew was that the love of God worked and expanded within him and drew him down into the depths of a vivid and suave darkness that was full of rest and yet full of life: a deep cloud that enveloped his whole being and in whose center he came face to face somehow with God. It was not that he saw anything or beard anything, but his whole being was pervaded with the loving sense of God’s presence. And God, with the power of that indefinable nearness, drew all his mind and will to Himself, so that words became useless and thoughts ceased to have meaning and memories became a nuisance and all the earth vanished into insignificance and only one thing mattered: the silence, the deep fruitful silence, of adoration and love with which his heart was full.

  But that was in 1865. He was in a Trappist monastery in the full tradition of De Rancé. When his superiors and confessors discovered how Brother Candide was behaving at prayer, they did not give him their approval. They told him he should not be so idle. They told him he was wasting his time and laying himself open to the temptations of the devil, that he had better keep himself busy with pious thoughts and affections of the will. He should formulate acts of sorrow for sin and ask pardon of the God Whose justice was outraged by the crimes of the world. He should meditate upon the last things and the divine attributes and many other points that he would find in good spiritual books.

  So Brother Candide, who was a simple and docile brother and perfectly obedient, did just what he was told.

  And when love called him down again into the peace of that fruitful and silent darkness where he would be alone with his God, Brother Candide kept words in his mouth and sentences in his mind and forced his memory to keep turning over abstract truths about the Divinity or about the economy of salvation. And although he felt as if his soul were being torn to pieces by the teeth of a steel harrow, he kept on doing what his superiors had told him to do and he made acts and he said he was sorry for his sins. . . .

  He suffered very much for years, fighting in anguish against what his soul desired and his whole heart longed for, in order not to displease God by disobeying his superiors; but finally God brought the torture to an end, and Brother Candide found understanding and peace and encouragement when he went to receive spiritual direction from young Father Vital Lehodey, one of the new priests in the monastery. Then his heart expanded with joy, and he gave himself up without fear to the love of God that so quietly, yet so urgently, demanded to possess his whole being: and as he stood in choir, his heart followed the chanting of the monks with an ardor that did not speak and did not sing, because it was too deep for speech and for song: it surged and swelled like the waves and the tides of the sea.

  XIV

  Paradisus Claustralis

  THE kings and the dictators and the mighty of the world accomplish their works with great noise, with speeches and drums and loud-speakers and brass and the thunder of bombers. But God works in silence.

  Nations, dynasties leave their mark upon the world by tearing pieces out of the map, by killing men and sending them into exile or slavery. But while armies destroy with great terror and confusion, God builds life where they have sown death and brings sanctity out of the poisoned stream of their hatred.

  The spirit of the world, which is selfishness and envy and conspiracy and lust and terror, makes men loud from the fear of their own hollowness. But the Spirit of God gives them peace, teaches them not to be afraid of silence but to find themselves in quiet. The spirit of the world, which is avarice and oppression, arms men against one another and divides them against themselves and against others: it splits the world into armed camps. But the Spirit of God draws men together and unites them in peacefulness and teaches them to work together and to carry one another’s burdens and to honor one another, in spite of their faults and their weaknesses and their infirmities. It teaches them to be compassionate and to obey one another for the sake of God’s love and His peace.

  While the world is drunk with the great chalice of the Whore of Babylon, which is war, God brings His chosen ones, His elect, into hidden monasteries to refresh them with the peace that is born of the love of brothers living together in unity.

  But the world envies them their peace. Such happiness is a reproach. It condemns the spirit by which the world lives. It accuses the rich men of their injustice and the Communists of their inhuman and complacent hatreds and the humanists of their insufficiency. It denies everything that the world stands for.

  There are two ways in which the world gets its revenge. One is by open hatred, by direct attack. That is useless. It does no more harm to the monastic Order than the vintner does to his vine when he prunes it in the spring. In fact, it is God, in silence and wisdom, Who uses the Church’s enemies to perfect His saints and purify His religion.

  The other kind of revenge is more subtle, because it is not even conscious: it comes not from hatred that is aware of itself as hatred, but from a love that is misdirected and turns to hatred without realizing it. For that is the way the world loves: it destroys what it loves, because its love is selfish and can be satisfied only by devouring its object.

  That is what happens when the men who live in monasteries pay more attention to the gifts of men than to the gifts of God; when they begin to depend on the example and the tactics of the world and to attach more impor
tance to money and power and health and comfort and visible forms of heroism than to the means which God has given them. For the monk has only one thing, in the last analysis, that he can depend on: and that is not a thing, it is God.

  That is the key to the Cistercian life, the secret of its austerity and its penances. The monk becomes poor and gives up the possession of all material things—houses, cars, books, clothes of his own, everything: he even renounces the possession of his own body and his own will. But the only reason why he makes himself poor and struggles to keep himself that way is in order to be immensely rich. For, when he owns nothing, God becomes his fortune, and he owns and enjoys all things in God, their Creator. When the monk ceases to rule and dominate his own life, for the sake of God, it is God Who assumes command of his life and his body and his soul: but to be commanded and ruled entirely by God is to be endowed with His tremendous love, for, whatever God touches, He floods it with the riches of His infinite actuality.

  Therefore, the worst misfortune that can befall the Cistercian monk is to acquire things, to regain that possession and control over his own person and his own being and his own faculties which he is supposed to have renounced and transferred into the complete power of God.

  Now, for the Cistercians, poverty is a function of obedience and the common life. The temptation to gain possession of special objects in a monastery does not rise far beyond such things as books and fountain pens: but what is much more important is this interior, spiritual communism of the will. Exterior possessions are, after all, only a sign, an expression of interior ones: self-centeredness, selfish desires. A man cannot own other things unless he first owns himself with an unshakable attachment. And although it may be good to get rid of exterior things, it is useless to do that if you do not also mean to give up your own desires and become poor in spirit. For, if your will is attached to things, it is attached, and you are not free, whether or not you actually possess the things you desire.