It seems more and more people are living to be a hundred, and if he were alive, Thomas Merton would this year be among them. Merton (1915-1968) remains the most famous Christian monk of the twentieth century, and his writings will engage scholars and others for some time to come. His fame began in 1948, when his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, became an unexpected best-seller. In England it was published as Elected Silence, a phrase from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “The Habit of Perfection.”
Once he had made the best-seller lists, readers and publishers wanted more. Fortunately for them, Merton was a gifted and prolific writer, turning out essays, poems, translations, and book-length musings on the spiritual life. In the decades since his sudden death at an international monastic conference in Bangkok, Thailand, several volumes of his private journals and letters have been published.
By the mid-1960s, Merton had begun exploring controversial topics. He wrote about points where Zen Buddhism and Roman Catholicism might connect, especially in the area of monastic spirituality, and he addressed the era’s turbulence over race, poverty, and war. These later writings have become favorites of activists for social change, while this same phase of his life has left others suspecting Merton of groovy syncretism. Yet, at the time of his death he had at the press a slim book on contemplative prayer that fit in well with his early work, back when one of his first admirers was Fulton Sheen.
Since Merton’s centenary coincides with the Church’s Year of Consecrated Life, let us consider a passage from his early thirties. In December, 1947, Merton noted in his journal the death of Brother Gregory, an elderly native of Switzerland. Merton published that journal in 1952 as The Sign of Jonas.
“Brother Gregory,” Merton wrote, “was a saintly old man,” and Merton asked their abbot what had made the departed brother so holy. “I don’t know what kind of answer I was hoping to get,” Merton admitted. “It would have made me happy to hear something about a deep and simple spirit of prayer, something about unsuspected heights of faith, purity of heart, interior silence, solitude, love for God. Perhaps he had spoken with the birds, like Saint Francis.”
Instead, the abbot replied, “Brother was always working,” and he added, “Brother did not even know how to be idle. If you sent him out to take care of the cows in the pasture, he still found plenty to do. He brought in buckets of blackberries. He did not know how to be idle.” Merton was crestfallen. “I came out of Reverend Father’s room,” he recorded, “feeling like a man who has missed his train.”
Serving God and neighbor is the essence of the vocation of a religious brother. It is, of course, the basic vocation that goes along with Christian baptism, and religious vows build upon and reinforce those baptismal vows. The spirituality of brothers focuses on the example of the Holy Family’s hidden life of Nazareth. Thus, Brother Gregory’s obscurity: he is known only from the writings of a now famous priest who had met him.
Probably the most famous religious brother is the fictional Brother Cadfael, first appearing in the late 1970s. According to his creator, Ellis Peters, he was an early twelfth-century Welshman who fought in the First Crusade and then entered a Benedictine abbey in western England. There he tended the monastery’s medicinal herb garden and solved crimes.
Next to him in name recognition would be the real-life Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection (Nicolas Herman, c. 1605-1691), a Carmelite friar in Paris. There he worked in his monastery’s kitchen and is best known for his spiritual observations posthumously compiled under the title The Practice of the Presence of God.
Despite the perennial popularity of that little book, Brother Lawrence has not joined the ranks of canonized brothers. Most recent among canonized brothers is Brother André Bessette (1845-1937) of Canada, and others include Majorca’s Alphonsus Rodriguez (1532-1617) and Bavaria’s Conrad of Parzham (1818-1894). As it happens, all three served their religious communities as porters. Saint Alphonsus, a Jesuit, has been commemorated in a sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Saint Conrad’s canonization in 1934 was a big event for the young Ratzinger boys, Georg and Joseph.
If priests are the Church’s fathers, religious brothers are the Church’s bachelor uncles. Over the years brothers have been characterized by plain and even at times blunt speech, while also being known for reticence and a great capacity for inner stillness. Tragically, religious brothers have not all been paragons of virtue: one need only recall reports of a number of Christian Brothers in Ireland preying upon teenage and pre-teenage boys. Nevertheless, as the presence of saintly brothers demonstrates, the vocation of brother can be a way to holiness. If it were not, the Church would have suppressed it ages ago.
Once again the Church faces a shortage of vocations, and so the faithful ought to pray for an increase in vocations to the religious brotherhood. Time and again one senses that a prayer “for priests and religious” really means “for priests and nuns.” There is another way, as much a “little way” as that of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, a way first marked out for men by Saint Joseph, the chaste and silent carpenter of Nazareth. It is a contemplative way, yet for that reason it stands at the service of others, prayerfully doing the day’s work without any fanfare.
Sometimes one hears of a man who had entered religious life but then left, having discerned that priesthood was not for him. One wonders whether the possibility of being a religious brother was ever presented to him. Perhaps God was calling him to belong to a particular religious community, but not to the priesthood. During vocation visits and religious formation, a healthy approach would be to remain open to seeing that option as both viable and respectable. After all, the primary purpose of religious life is to provide someone with a way to sanctification.
Although he may never be among the officially canonized, Brother Gregory of Gethsemani answered God’s call to struggle along that hidden path to holiness. One of Merton’s finest books is No Man Is an Island (1955), and Brother Gregory showed by his simple yet active life that Christian holiness has less to do with mastering encyclicals and esoteric concepts such as apophatic prayer than considering that one’s time is better spent thinking that others might like some fresh blackberries.
Daniel J. Heisey, O. S. B, is a Benedictine monk of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he is known as Brother Bruno. He teaches Church History at Saint Vincent Seminary.
Merton wrote much that is very fine, much that is very useful, and some adventurous and highly interesting poetry both conventional and experimental. He also wrote too much, especially the journaling and letter writing which seems to have been compulsive with a certain literary set — and which is predictably favored by those deepest into the cult of personality of Merton, a development which would have dismayed him. He is also a victim of a virtual schism in the American Church only beginning in his lifetime, which either deifies or demonizes him, and also of a vast, ponderous academic industry following in his wake.
The ordinary Catholic reader thus does not know where to start, and there is little reliable guidance, despite many too-prestigious and/or too “highly qualified” applicants for the position. Unfortunately then, while all is in print, for practical purposes it may as well not be.
I have read all of Merton, having first visited Gethsemani in spring 1971. For those interested in pertinent Merton teaching for this year of consecrated life, I highly recommend the masterful Inner Experience, a posthumous book he apparently thought unfinished and put publishing strictures upon. However, like many writers, Merton was a poor judge of his own work. Seven Story Mountain is a very uneven book, parts brilliant, parts plain awful, formlessly glued together to appear coherent, and unfortunately it is where most start and end. Notably, the Cistercian Press is slowly publishing Merton’s great work as a novice director — his in house vocation and what may prove over time to be his most lasting and influential work.