Providence (8 page)

As I say, this is how I understood it at the time. It isn’t the way I understand it now. Very far from it.…

Yes, naturally you want to know what I meant when I said, “And the god spoke.” I’ll get to it, believe me, as soon as I can, but I can’t deal with it yet.

At the time, I dealt with it in the context I was operating in. I was a Christian pursuing the contemplative life, and there was a definite place in that context for the experience I’d had. God had made me a gift, a “free” gift, in that it hadn’t been earned in any sense. It isn’t possible to earn such a gift. In fact, in the literature of the mystical life, the gift has a name. It’s called
infused contemplation.

Now I had a problem. I had to tell Father Louis about this event—at least it seemed so to me. To keep it a secret from my spiritual director would have amounted to a sin of pride, would be to say, “Well, look, Father Louis, God and I have a few things going between us that you don’t need to know about.”

I had the rather naive notion that Father Louis would rejoice with me over this, so I didn’t bother to think it through. I didn’t try to anticipate his reactions, I just blurted it out. He listened for about ten seconds, then abruptly cut me off. My impression was that he was disgusted with me, disillusioned. Disappointed that I’d make something up like this in order to inflate my importance in his eyes. It was never mentioned again.…

Yes, I suppose I do feel somewhat bitter about this. He took it for granted that I’d made it up. There was no doubt of that. If he’d thought anything else—that I was mistaken or that I was psychotically deluded—he obviously would have wanted to know much more. By refusing
to listen to what I was trying to say, he was clearly letting me know that he wasn’t about to be taken in by some greenhorn postulant.…

Well, I understand what you’re saying, but I see it differently. Father Louis wasn’t a saint, wasn’t perfect. As he would have said himself, the people in that monastery were very ordinary people, leading a very ordinary life. I didn’t take that into account when I told him what had happened. I expected him to be perfect. I expected him to behave like a saint, and instead he behaved like an ordinary person.…

Yes, you’re probably right: I still think he should have behaved like a saint. I would say rather that I
wish
he’d behaved like a saint. I trusted him, took a great risk with him, opened myself up to him, and he dismissed me as a fake. He gave me the kind of reply I would have expected from my father, not the kind of reply I expected from my spiritual director. It hurt me.

But it didn’t matter as deeply that day as it would have the day before. I had said my yes. I was at Gethsemani to stay.

This marked the beginning of a new phase of life at Gethsemani, though it lasted only a very short time—a few days at most. I now went out every day with the novices. One day, as I mentioned earlier, we went out to weed a field of tomatoes. Another day, we went to the woodshed to split logs for firewood.

There I was in my Brooks Brothers sport coat and gray flannel trousers, swinging a mallet. After an hour or so, I
was literally staggering with exhaustion and my hands were masses of broken blisters. I was completely out of shape, of course. The monk in charge of the operation—not Father Louis—came over and told me it was time for me to quit. I, the little saint, said, “No, no, I’m all right. I can go on.” Two minutes later, I took a clumsy swing and broke the shaft of the mallet I was using.

I carried the pieces over to where the monk was standing and said, “I’m sorry. I broke my mallet.”

“It isn’t
your
mallet,” he snapped. “It belongs to the
community.”

I tell this story to make the point that I was
learning
how to make enemies at the monastery. I had no idea how irksome I was being, playing the little saint, courageously and stupidly insisting on working when I was no longer competent to work, when I might easily have injured myself or someone else.

The monk was perfectly right to rebuke me. I was thinking of the mallet as mine. I was thinking of nothing but myself and how much I was suffering and how noble and heroic I was being, but I was completely unaware that this
showed.
I was in fact beginning to reveal my true colors; once people began giving me things to
do
I began to implement my fundamental psychological strategy:
If I’m perfect, people will love me.
I knew God wanted me to be perfect; Jesus himself had said so: “Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” I was certain that nothing is more lovable than perfection and had no inkling that nothing is more irritating.

It didn’t matter.

A couple days after this episode, Father Louis called me
into the little cubbyhole he used as an office and told me he had decided I should leave the monastery.

In an earlier conversation, Father Louis had revealed the fact that he had only recently “discovered” Sigmund Freud. He knew this was an oddity for someone who had moved in sophisticated circles before entering the monastery, but he was perfectly open about it. He had missed out on Freudian thought and was now making up for it.

One result of his newfound enthusiasm for Freud was that he had instituted a rudimentary sort of psychological screening of monastic candidates: Before admission, they were to take a Rorschach test. He had just now, he told me on this day, received the results of my test, which I’d taken in Omaha a week before leaving for Kentucky.…

Why do I call it rudimentary? I don’t mean the test is rudimentary. I mean that using it as the sole measure of someone’s psychological status is rudimentary. Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not suggesting it was inadequate. In my case, I’m sure it was more than adequate. Father Louis didn’t describe the results in detail, but it’s not hard to imagine what they were. I was a very insecure and immature young man, terrified of sex, incompetent in personal relations of almost every kind, full of self-doubts, and desperately low in self-esteem, and the Rorschach could hardly have missed all that.

What the Rorschach indicated, Father Louis said, keeping it simple, was that I had some growing up to do. I said this struck me as unfair—everyone has some growing up to do at age nineteen! He had little choice but to point
out that some nineteen-year-olds have more growing up to do than others.

When it became clear that the decision to send me home wasn’t discussable, that I wasn’t going to be given any chance to prove myself at all, I couldn’t hide the depth of my disappointment. I wanted to, believe me, but there was no holding back the tears.

I was utterly crushed. I couldn’t have been more wounded if Father Louis had taken out a hammer and hit me on the head. This was a rejection that went beyond any rejection I’d ever known. This was rejection not only by Father Louis, this was rejection by God himself.

Obviously this was the way I perceived it, not the way Father Louis presented it. He said something like this: “Look, I didn’t ask to be the novice master—or even want to be the novice master—but the abbot asked me to take on this task. Providence has put the disposition of these things into his hands, so I had to conclude that this was what God wanted me to do at this time. A different abbot might have chosen a different novice master, but this abbot is the one we actually have, and he chose me. And because he chose me, the disposition of things pertaining to the novices is in my hands. In other words, Providence has put it into my hands to decide who comes to Gethsemani and who doesn’t and to decide who stays at Gethsemani and who doesn’t.

“Another novice master might have made a different judgment in your case, but I’m the novice master you actually have, and this is what I judge to be the best thing for you right now. As your spiritual director, I think the best thing for you is to go back out into the world, and you can either shake your fist at the heavens for treating you unfairly or you can accept this as an act of Providence.

“I’m no more important in the divine scheme of things than you are. I was put here, first, to make sure that you
got
here and, second, to make sure that you didn’t
stay
here. As far as I’m concerned, this is what God wanted for you. This says nothing about what he’ll want for you in three years or five years or ten years. If God wants you to come back to Gethsemani, then that’s fine. I’m not banishing you forever, I’m just sending you back out into the world to do a little more growing up.”

I heard the words, I understood the words, but they couldn’t wipe away my feelings of desolation and abandonment and humiliation. I asked him if I could at least stay till Easter, which was ten or twelve days away, but he didn’t think that was a good idea.…

What? Of course I felt humiliated! My God, I hadn’t even lasted a month! How was I going to explain this? Was I going to lie and say it was just too tough for me, or was I going to tell the truth and admit that I’d been chucked out? Those were the only explanations I could offer: Either I was a wimp or I was a sicko.

I’m sitting here wondering if I really need to go through the next two weeks, which were very painful indeed. I suppose I’d better. To leave them out would just be sparing myself.…

Merton’s enthusiasm for Freudianism was rather like a convert’s. He was sold on it and wanted everyone else to be sold on it. In a word, he thought I should immediately go into psychoanalysis, and he began to make plans for me to do this directly from the monastery. It’s easy enough to see now that he was seriously overreaching when he took it upon himself to operate in this sphere, but I certainly didn’t see it at the time. Psychoanalysis was all he knew about, so naturally it was his answer to every condition and situation. It didn’t matter whether I was a borderline psychotic or just a kid who needed to do some growing up, I needed psychoanalysis. I didn’t agree, but what did I know? This was my spiritual director, and to put myself in his hands was to put myself in the hands of God.

I moved over to the retreat house, a miserable, depressed exile. The days dragged past. Father Louis was bent on shuttling me directly to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka. As I say, what did I know? I was in a daze, grieving, stunned.

I remember one day he dropped by my room in the retreat house with the air of someone making an obligatory visit to death row. I was no longer fully among the living. One day the abbot stopped me in the hall, and I
thought he was going to wish me well or to tell me he was sorry things hadn’t worked out for me, but no, he just wanted to make sure I understood I couldn’t use the monastery to hide from the draft; I had to get in touch with the Selective Service as soon as I got home. I told him I understood that, and he turned and walked away without another word.

When the next retreat broke up on Palm Sunday, I got a ride with one of the retreatants back to the airport. He was clearly eaten up with curiosity about me, about life inside the monastery, and of course especially about why I was leaving. I was not forthcoming. He said he guessed it must be a very tough life. I said, “Yeah.”

That night I checked into a hotel in Topeka, Kansas. In the morning I reported to the clinic for a battery of tests, which I’m sure laid bare in new and wonderful ways everything I’ve told you and more. The high point came a couple days later, when one of the staff arrived with a clipboard to gouge out the sort of specifics that the tests couldn’t provide. He knew the weak points and sore spots, knew where to probe for the terrors and doubts that I’d hidden from everyone.

I could have told him to get lost, but I didn’t realize that. In my simpleminded fashion, I still imagined I was traveling under orders from God, and if God wanted this psychiatrist to invade my inner space, all I could do was submit. I submitted. He spent some two days tearing me apart to see what was festering inside.

Meanwhile my father was driving down from Omaha to collect me, and he was scheduled to arrive late in the afternoon of the second day. Naturally he was paying for
all this, which made him the client. It was understood that the psychiatrist would make his report and his recommendations to Bert, then it would be over.

“But you’re not going to tell my father all this stuff, all this stuff we’ve been talking about.”

The psychiatrist assured me that he wasn’t going to do that.

Well, of course he did. That almost goes without saying, doesn’t it? He didn’t hold back anything. The doctor knows best, after all, and, as I say, Dad was the client, not me. I just sat there like a drooling moron, my ears crimson, while he pumped it all out.

I can’t imagine what we talked about in the car going home. Maybe we didn’t talk at all. I thankfully have no memory at all of what happened next or of the weeks that followed.

E
IGHT