Merton and Cistercian Formation

On my coffee table are four of Merton's writings on the Desert Fathers.again. I have been sitting out in the desert now with the Fathers and Merton for about two months. Anything by Merton I dig into like a hungry dog on a bone and approached these with the same ardour. I found a different Merton then the one I am accustomed to in his journals.These books are the works Merton as a Novice Director used in the monastic formation of the Novices of Gethsemene Abbey. This is the Father Louis the Teacher. There is a different side of him reflected in the work he does as a formation director.

The Tom I got to know in his journals is not really all that pleased with parts of his Cistercian life. He complains about having to get away from the hussle and bustle of the Cheese Factory, he tell side splitting funny stories about trying to drive a tractor, his frustrations with being silenced in his pacifist anti-war activism and his ongoing muse about some other form of monastic life.  It is the realness that endears us to Tom or Louis or whatever the name of the day is. It is his honesty and willingness to expose his soul that wins us over. My favorite book of Thomas Mertons is one of his journals called Entering the Silence when he is still a fairly new monk caught up in the mystery of the Faith. I was moved to tears by his rendition of St. Bernards Amori Christi, where Christ leans from the Cross and embraces him. Toms mystical nature flares into hot and high flames in moments before the Eucharist and you can feel the heat over death and time.
So when one encounters several writings of Merton's as a Novice Director the difference is between the private self and the business self of Merton. In his work as a Novice Director he pulls out his best intellectual and research self, polishes off his love for the hermit life and presents his entering monks with a brilliant work of formation into the Cisterican life. As  Lay Cistercian involved in a pioneer work of forming a Lay Cistercian community online and forming some thirty people ( the average size of a monastery)in a community Mertons work as a Novice Director was exactly the insights I needed to learn from. Merton was dedicated to taking the Novices back to the origins of monastic life. He does this well in his deep research on the sayings and practices of the Desert Fathers. He lays down the foundations in his first book on Cassian and then  moves into Pre- Benedictine monasticism found also spread across from Egypt into the Palestinian deserts. Thinking about a the Desert Fathers topic we had for our Lay Cistercians I went back to check the talk by Dom Armand Veilleux. Dom Armand is out of Scourmont Abbey and has a large online resource reference library on monastic topics in his own right. He mentioned that the monastic life started more or less at the same time in all the early churches and was not necessarily started in Egypt and then Palestine and then the East. He also suggested that when we look back to a time for when the monastic movement started we can go to the Baptism of Christ. Interesting. We can go there  because John the Baptist was from the desert Baptism movement and when the Early Church wanted to adopt some of the radical gospel of Christ they followed this renounciation of the world in the gospel that called them to "Give all you have to the poor and come and follow me", and the follow for them was modelling  a solitary  or desert direction.


Armond Veilleux carries a fondness for the Pachomonian cenobic lifestyle as a cenobic monk while Merton tended to be more focused on the hermit an orientation he was finally able to realize within a monastic community in his hermitage. Merton restored to the Cistercian formation the taste of the desert in the souls of his Novices. Much Jesuit and pious teaching had been forming Cistercian novices and Merton in his typical way wanted to shake it up a little. In bringing the Desert Fathers back into the early formation of the monks Merton followed  the direction of the early Cistercian reformers such as Stephen Harding.He took a few monks into a desert like wilderness in France to struggle in the brambles and barrenes of the land to follow the Rule of St. Benedict in a deeper,stricter way then it was in some of the monasteries of the time. 
 There reformation was so difficult and their ability to survive in their harsh chosen existance was becoming desperate when St. Bernard with thirty of his friends and male family members came knocking on the door and saved the fresh new movement from faltering. There are over the history of the Church when hope seems to be lost of the faithful have lost their way a fresh voice in the dark like a light that says "go this way". Merton was such a voice. Merton in his role of Novice Master brings us the best of the Desert Fathers both the Egyptian and the Palestinian and the Eastern forms . He crosses the bridges from the Egyptian desert to mystics like Simeon the Stylite who sat on the top of pillars for a lifetime sometimes speaking to the masses below sometimes silent. The desert Saint are no less saintly be they Egyptian ,or Syrian or more Eastern yet. They are all Fathers whose words are to rembered internalized and respected. 


     It is helpful to put oneself inside the group listening to Thomas Merton and although he is an academic ask ourselves a question. Why am I here?. If I am a monk then I am not sitting under this direction for class credit, I am not writing a book on Merton, I am not getting academic credit. Cloistered away in a monastery I am certainly not trying to impress anyone. Why the Desert Fathers. Why for Novices and often when Thomas looked around the room he would find older monks and sometimes the prior. The Fathers taught on how to deal with temptation. They faced the hard realities of the monastic life pre-Vatican 11 and the Fathers helped them understand the "why's of a life of ascetic living. Cistercian's wanted to be spiritual warriors. The Desert Fathers had this as their model. The back of the Benedictian medal holds a liittle known secret sentence of exorcism write in Latin. It is a clear statement that as a follower of St. Benedict they hold no traffic with the devil and all his devices. After Christ and following Christ into the desert the Fathers prepared themselves for spirtual combat by fasting and prayer in a way that studying them would form the novice into a similar warrior of the desert. To leave a young monk uniformed that he is walking into warfare with darkness when he enters a monastery would be to leave him unprepared for the battle he is about to encounter. So Thomas who has battled through many of his own demons to find himself inside the Catholic faith and a monastery knows from experience that in order to succeed in their vocation the monks must be formed in the spirituality of the desert.