By the time of his death on December 10, 1968, Thomas Merton had become that memorable paradox, a celebrity monk. Although he led a largely cloistered life as a Trappist at the Abbey of Gethsemani in rural Kentucky, Merton’s many books, including his bestselling 1948 memoir, The Seven Storey Mountain, made him a literary star.
Merton struggled to reconcile his religious calling with his global stature. His desire to address political topics such as nuclear proliferation and civil rights brought him into conflict with leaders of his Cistercian order. And his hunger for travel was hard to balance with his monastic obligations. He was attending a conference of Catholic and non-Christian monks in Thailand when a short circuit in a floor fan apparently electrocuted him in his room.
Five decades after Merton’s passing, his books live on. Later this year, New Directions will publish Silence, Joy, a survey of his poetry and prose. Merton’s hermitage at Gethsemani continues to attract visitors from around the world. Brother Paul Quenon, whom Merton advised when Quenon was a novice, has been the hermitage’s longtime caretaker.
In its chronicle of youthful rebellion, radical conversion, and the romance of religious faith, The Seven Storey Mountain has been compared to St. Augustine’s Confessions as a seminal work of Catholicism, selling more than a million copies in more than a dozen languages. Its suggestion of a richly fulfilling life within the fold of a cloistered community has renewed appeal amid today’s throbbing urgencies of smartphones and Twitter.
“In an age of distraction and forgetfulness and speed,” says journalist, essayist, and travel writer Pico Iyer, “it’s no surprise, perhaps, that more and more of us are going on retreat, or trying to bring even a little bit of a monk’s discipline and clarity into our overcrowded days.”
Iyer, who writes the foreword to Quenon’s new memoir, In Praise of the Useless Life, is one of many Merton enthusiasts who have made their way to Merton’s monastery, hosted by Quenon when they arrive. Among the other pilgrims we learn about in Quenon’s book are poets Seamus Heaney and Czeslaw Milosz, along with Sister Helen Prejean, whose bestselling Dead Man Walking, adapted into the movie of that name, made her a global voice against capital punishment.
Quenon seems mildly surprised that people keep showing up at Merton’s old stomping grounds. Though their arrival has by now become routine, he calls these faithful “unexpected visitors” and wonders “why they would come here, of all places.” As the title of In Praise of the Useless Life implies, nothing much happens at Gethsemani—at least little that easily can be measured by the market, the media, or modern culture at large.
When properly conducted, life at Gethsemani—and, Quenon hints, an ideal life lived anywhere—“serves no apparent purpose, other than the hidden marvel of being in God.”
This doesn’t mean a passive existence, nor has Quenon led one. Since coming to Gethsemani in 1958, he’s done electrical chores, handled office work, helped with building projects, nurtured the music ministry, published several books of poetry, and taken studio-quality photographs. That, and tending to Merton’s hermitage, keeps him busy.
The challenge—one that followed Merton and to a lesser degree dogs Quenon—is to venerate work as a window into grace while not idolizing the accomplishments of mind and hand.
Although he reveres Merton, who was known at Gethsemani as Father Louis, Quenon notes the pride, sometimes bordering on conceit, that Merton took in his literary prowess. “For a few years, I was the one operating the mimeograph machine and could see how Fr. Louis liked getting things into print, even if it was merely a mimeograph,” Quenon recalls. “One day he handed me an essay, newly typed up, and slapped his hand against his hip and blew on it, like dropping a hot potato: the newest writing, fresh out of the oven.”
Merton’s literary motivations were complex, but the value of his oeuvre strikes Quenon as undeniable: “While writing was often a burden and complication, creating conflict in his life, it was a positive part of his vocation nevertheless.”
Merton’s struggles lead Quenon to wonder about the underlying contradiction of a cloistered monk’s chronicling himself and his fellows for publication—a dilemma at the heart of In Praise of the Useless Life. “In general,” he tells readers, “I think monks and nuns should be putting out some token of their existence (however modest that may be) for others to hear. To the surprise of many, this world continues to be a place where monasticism exists, and we monks do well to let people get some whiff of it, whether they take it seriously or not. For my part, it usually surprises me when anyone finds value in what I write.”
Self-effacement is a theme for Quenon, who takes pains to point out that he doesn’t see his own writing as remotely equal to Merton’s. No reasonable reader can fault him for not being Thomas Merton, though one does occasionally wish for Useless Life to be a deeper book than it is. Quenon has a habit of raising provocative questions without fully exploring them, as when he mentions a long conversation with Iyer about
Quenon doesn’t detail this line of inquiry or offer his own views, concluding with a shrug: “I often find the crisis of romance Merton endured is of more interest to married people than to celibate religious.”
He’s equally cursory in a passage about Milosz’s polite disagreement with Merton about the nature of nature itself. Milosz thought that Merton uncritically hailed nature as a source of spiritual affirmation, overlooking its darker aspects. Quenon, an avid observer of the outdoors who even sleeps outside each night, fails to weigh in himself.
He seems most engaged in a chapter on Emily Dickinson, celebrating her as an abiding spiritual influence: “Her prescription for inner growth is a perfect primer for a Trappist-Cistercian novice. ‘Growth of Man—like Growth of Nature . . . / Must achieve—Itself— / Through the solitary prowess / Of a silent life.’ ”
Quenon delves with perceptive nuance into Dickinson’s poems, considering the degree to which her verse was meant to express spiritual certitude or doubt. “What is both puzzling and authentic is how she can entertain opposite opinions about time and eternity,” he writes. “She lingers on the boundary between the two, jumps from one side to the other and back again.”
Quenon stops short of a unifying theory of Dickinson’s work, underscoring the intellectual restraint that informs Useless Life. Ultimately, one of the charming things about the memoir is the author’s refusal to cast himself as smarter or wiser than he actually is.
To those who assume that a monk is in constant and direct communion with the divine, Quenon offers a disclaimer: “A friend once said, ‘I would love to get inside the head of a monk to see what your life is like.’ I doubt anyone would want to stay inside my head for very long. Not much appears there in terms of spiritual excitement, let alone progress. At most, I live with a dim intuition, an implicit faith that something worthwhile is going on.”
If Merton was a mystic of bright epiphanies, Quenon comes closer to the spiritual experience touching most of us—a marathon, not a sprint. “I have never been a great runner, but I do like to hike,” he writes early on, hinting at what could also describe his quiet slog toward redemption. He’s more inclined to the shaping influence of regimen than the random flash of insight. “The daily routine of the monastery eventually levels you to the plateau of your ordinariness,” he writes. “There the Word become flesh meets me, precisely where I feel the ache of being human.”
The daily rituals of Gethsemani suggest a world without change, though even a monastery is touched at the margins by the march of modernity. Quenon hears a biblical reading at mass about the tower of Babel, a confusing mess, and thinks about “the especially bewildering political atmosphere of today.” Meanwhile, one of Gethsemani’s loveliest views “has been punctured by a blinking cell-phone tower facing me. That surely would have made Fr. Louis storm off to Alaska in indignation, but the rest of us have to live with it.”
As he nears 80, Quenon has come to better understand what all monks—and all sentient souls—are supposed in time to grasp: a sense of what lasts and what does not. “The aging human body gradually leans forward, closer to the earth, as if gravity were pulling it toward its destiny,” he writes. “St. Benedict accredited that lowered head to a monk’s growth in humility. I hope that is true, but meanwhile I am trying to practice good posture and humility as well.”
