Father Augustine May, O.C.S.O, was thinking about that as he sat in the modest room assigned him in the Madame Cadillac Building.
Tom Merton, he thought, as he slowly swirled a water glass one-quarter filled with Jack Daniel’s Tennessee whiskey, Tom Merton did an awful lot for us Trappists. He brought in a lot of dough and a lot of vocations.
In the 1950s, a bumper crop of young applicants came to the Trappists, many of them attracted by the writings of one monk, Father Louis. At the peak there were more than two hundred at Gethsemani Abbey alone. Father Augustine knew the statistics well. Entering in the early sixties, he had been among the last of that bumper crop. Now, hell, the Kentucky abbey would be lucky to have eighty monks. And his own monastery in Wellesley, Massachusetts, would feel successful if it had half that number.
Father Augustine-Gus, as he was known to his confreres-hoped he wasn’t being too vain in thinking he could make a difference. He was convinced the world was more than ready for another Thomas Merton. Was it just possible the next Merton could be himself?
He swished the whiskey around in his mouth. The familiar tart taste made him grimace. Somehow he found the pungency pleasant.
He had tried the Merton approach-writing for scholarly and, mostly, contemplative periodicals. But the articles brought in little money and, as far as anyone could tell, no appreciable vocations. Then came the mystery novel,
Father Augustine had to agree that such trips were not what Benedict, Bernard or, especially, Rance had had in mind.
Benedict, of course, started the whole thing in the sixth century. He was not the first, but he surely was one of the founders of Western monasticism. The key to it all was the community of men living together with vows designed by Saint Benedict’s rule of life.
In the ninth and tenth centuries, reforms were made as monasticism grew away from Benedict’s concept. But these reforms at the Synod of Auchen and at Cluny were overshadowed by those of Saint Bernard in the twelfth century and the beginning of the Cistercian order.
Bernard’s interpretation of the monastic ideal endured virtually unchanged for five hundred years. Then, in 1664, at the monastery of La Trappe in Normandy, Abbot Rance made an extremely tight right turn, and the Trappists emerged with a negative appreciation of mankind and an emphasis on penance unknown to the earlier reformers.
Throughout fourteen centuries, then, one might view the rule of life set down by Saint Benedict as an inspired document. Even now, it remains the foundation of Western civilization’s monastic life.
That way of life was, perhaps, perfected by Saint Bernard at the beginning of the Cistercian order. Then Rance added a spartan rigidity to his reorganization of the Trappists.
It was into the Trappist religious order according to Rance that Thomas Merton and Augustine May entered. But it was not Rance’s version of the Cistercians that Father Louis left when he died. As was the case with so much else in Catholicism, the Second Vatican Council helped change all that.
The religious order that Merton and May entered, among many other stiff structures, forbade talking at any time to anyone but one’s superiors without explicit permission from the abbot. Of course, communication was necessary, so a sign language peculiar to the Trappists evolved. Stories are still told illustrating the inflexibility of the “Trappist way of life,” such as that of the monk who ran from cell to cell rousing the other monks and giving the sign for fire because the abbey was burning down around their ears.
Benedict’s rule called for “ora et labora”-prayer and work. The preconciliar Trappists interpreted that so inflexibly that at any given time when they were neither sleeping nor eating, they were either chanting prayers in chapel, or working, usually in the fields. Which led to the expression, “either in the [choir] stalls or the stables.”
One of the demands made of religious orders by Vatican II was that the orders reexamine their present status against the purpose for which they had been founded and that they return to those roots.
For the Trappists, that meant erasing much of what Rance had introduced and restoring the monastic precepts of Benedict and Bernard.
No longer are monasteries carbon copies of one another. The Trappists-the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance-have found unity in diversity. Sign language is gone. And, in an order founded for the contemplative life, finally, time has been allocated for contemplation.
Almost thirty years ago, Harold May had abandoned a promising advertising career and entered what he considered to be a little bit of heaven on earth-Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey. Rigorous but heavenly. And then, with the overwhelming changes-resisted at first-Father Augustine May, O.C.S.O, found a more profound and sensible heaven. This was what he was eager to share with today’s men, young and older.
He looked at the glass he was holding as if he had never seen it before. Was this his second or third drink? He couldn’t remember. Amazing how one could build a tolerance for the stuff. But, whichever number this was, it would be his last. For now. In a few minutes, he’d be going down to dinner. Food would take the edge off the alcohol.
He had arrived at the college wearing a business suit, but of course he had packed his Cistercian habit. Now he took it from the closet. The white tunic covered its wearer from neck to foot. A black scapular, much like a burial shroud, fitted over the head, falling to the floor fore and aft. A hood was attached to the scapular, but was pulled over the head only at specified times. Finally, a wide, heavy leather belt. This simple, ancient habit he wanted to share with others.
He knew he could not hope for enormous numbers of new applicants. Monasticism never had been attractive to a multitude. Always it had been a very specialized vocation. But it certainly ought to be more appealing now.
He began to don his habit.
Look at all those gurus roaming the country, advocating Transcendental Meditation, Zen Buddhism; there were the Maharishi, the Baghwan, Moonies. The East evangelizing, as it were, the West. The first time in history. Augustine recalled Saint Francis Xavier, who brought the Gospel to India and Japan, and died on his way to China. And the thousands of Christian missionaries who had followed Xavier. Always the West to the East.
Until now.
Augustine May was only one of many who were concerned about and wondered at this present phenomenon. Neither he nor his colleagues had much doubt concerning the motives of these largely successful gurus. Most of them became far more financially secure here than they could be in their respective homelands. And, while some undoubtedly were sincere, one could not ignore the economic rewards.
The larger question concerned their followers. Charges of brainwashing led to the innovative reaction called deprogramming.
But beyond the fringe groups and their immature needs that responded to the blandishments of the mystic East, there were quite normal young adults who recognized in themselves something missing, a psychic glue that could hold together the varied facets of their lives.
These, Augustine and his colleagues realized, were legitimate needs that were being met at least partially by the gurus with their versions of ancient Oriental religions. The hypothesis was that these seekers, completely beyond their power to change things, were products of Western civilization. Thus, whatever they might discover in the East, they would always remain foreigners to that culture.
The idea, then, was to introduce them to the contemplative heritage of Western civilization. For it existed, to be sure. The West would not have survived without it. Only at about the time of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, did this contemplative approach to reality begin to fade, to eventually be ground under and virtually disappear in retreat from materialism and capitalism.
It was here, at this point, that Augustine May saw himself stepping into the picture. In mystery he had found a popular genre.
