BECKONINGS FROM THE BOOKSHELF - Kristin Czarnecki
I’ve known the name Thomas Merton all my life. My father often mentioned him with great admiration. He used to tell us about reading The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton’s spiritual autobiography, when he was in college and the enormous impact it had upon him. Although I knew only the bare bones of Merton’s story, I knew that made sense. Catholic, scholar, writer, reader with a penchant for the outdoors, the colder and snowier the better—that was my father, who clearly shared commonalities with his idol. Seven Storey Mountain has been on my to-read list for many years. I haven’t deliberately put it off. I’ve read bits of Merton over the years and always find him interesting and thought-provoking. It’s just one of those things, I guess. If I live to be 100, I won’t have time to read all the books in my house. Still, there may be more to it than that, which I realized while reading When the Trees Say Nothing, a collection of Merton’s nature writings gathered from across his expansive oeuvre. My copy bears an inscription from my father.
Kristin:
Get to know Thomas
Merton, the greatest spiritual
writer of the 20th century.
Dad
When the Trees Say Nothing came out in 2003, so I imagine my dad must have given it to me for Christmas that year. I was happy to receive it and looked forward to reading it, yet it sat on a shelf for 18 years before I got around to it, three years after my father died. At that point, I suppose I was primed for it. Amid political upheaval and the ongoing pandemic, I was seeking means of reducing stress and anxiety. As 2021 sputtered to a close and the new year began, I vowed to turn away from screens and shut out noise as much as possible. I read Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now—and I did. I embarked on Dry January. I tried to meditate a few minutes each day. And I chose bedside reading that might calm and quiet my mind, including When the Trees Say Nothing. I also thought it was high time I became better acquainted with a writer who meant so much to my father. The book provided the balm for the soul I was hoping for, yet there were moments I could barely read through my tears.
***
Editor Kathleen Deignan has divided the small, easy-to-hold-in-the-hand book into chapters on the seasons, elements, firmament (sky and clouds, sun and moon, planets and stars), creatures (from butterflies to rodents to deer to bees), festivals (rain, flowers, trees), presences (mountains), and sanctuary (forest). Thomas Berry writes in the Foreword that the “variety of Merton’s experiences covers almost the entire panorama of the natural worlds available” to him in his decades in Kentucky, not far from where I write this in my home in the central part of the state. Merton recognized nature as “a mode of sacred presence primarily to be communed with in wonder and beauty and intimacy,” Berry continues. His gift “is this sense of the sacred throughout the entire range of the natural world.”
Merton entered the Trappist monastery of Gethsemani, near Bardstown, Kentucky, on December 10, 1941, when he was 26 years old. Ten years later, he requested greater solitude, whereupon “Abbot Dom James nominated him ‘forester,’” as Deignan explains in her introduction, “which entailed restoring the woodlands that had been stripped a decade earlier.” Along with tending the land and training novitiates, Merton read, wrote, and found peace and grace in the silence. A beautiful life, although not without its challenges. My father used to say that if my mother predeceased him, he would become a monk. In fact, he traveled to Gethsemani from time to time over the years for a retreat of solitude, contemplation, reading, and prayer, perhaps hoping to channel his hero in some way. At least, that’s how I imagine it. I never really asked.
Chapters in When the Trees Say Nothing contain numbered passages of varying lengths, from single sentences to several pages—jottings made throughout the day or ruminations within essays on other topics, perhaps, noting the angle of the sun, the texture of the snow, and the feel of soft pine needles beneath bare feet. He describes the sounds he hears, like rain on the roof of his cabin, birdsong, and leaves rustling in the wind. He also writes of human-made noise, such as the drone of planes overhead from the Fort Knox military base or the chugging of a nearby train. Silence emerges as his most prevalent theme, however, along with his great respect for those who appreciate it, and for those who seek to dwell within it. “In the silence of the countryside and the forest, in the cloistered solitude of my monastery, I have discovered the whole Western Hemisphere,” he declares.
Recounting his activities one late summer afternoon, he tells of “com[ing] down out of the novitiate, through the door in the wall, over the trestle and down into this green paradise of tall stalks and silence. I know the joy and the worship the Indians must have felt, and the Eucharistic rightness of it!” Although I wince at Merton’s reference to Native peoples in the past tense—odd given that he explored, embraced, and wrote about contemporary Indigenous spiritual practices—I can appreciate his sense of religious ecstasy in the forest. On another afternoon, feeling discouraged, he reorients himself as he sits on “a tree stump, in an even place. It was dry and a small cedar arched over it, like a green tent, forming an alcove. There I sat in silence and loved the wind in the forest and listened for a good while to God.”
***
Merton experiences the spiritual discernment that arises from immersion in the natural world. “The forms and individual characters of living and growing things, of inanimate beings, of animals and flowers and all nature, constitute their holiness in the sight of God. Their inscape,” he writes, adopting a term coined by Gerard Manley Hopkins to mean the unique essence of a creature or natural structure, “is their sanctity. It is the imprint of His wisdom and His reality in them.” Other passages show him relishing his role as forester. “How necessary it is for monks to work in the fields, in the rain, in the sun, in the mud, in the clay, in the wind,” he writes. “[T]hese are our spiritual directors and our novice-masters. They form our contemplation. They instill us with virtue. They make us as stable as the land we live in.”
Of course, the land we live in bears the brunt of human intrusion, including our dubious means of obtaining knowledge. “There is something you cannot know about a wren by cutting it up in a laboratory,” Merton states, a Wordsworthian pronouncement phrased so starkly, it takes my breath away. The only way to know the wren is if “it remains fully and completely a wren, itself, and hops on your shoulder if it feels like it.” He also acknowledges the folly of his own environmental meddling in a passage worth quoting at length:
The other day there was a beautiful whistling of titmice—and now today one of them lay dead on the grass under the house, which may well have been some fault of mine as we dumped some calcium chloride on a couple of anthills—not as a poison but as something to move them elsewhere. What a miserable bundle of foolish idiots we are! We kill everything around us even when we think we love and respect nature and life. This sudden power to deal death all around us simply by the way we live, and in total ‘innocence’ and ignorance, is by far the most disturbing symptom of our time.
Such sentiments bring to mind Nikki Giovanni’s poem “Allowables.” “I killed a spider,” she writes, “Not a murderous brown recluse / Nor even a black widow,” merely a small “Sort of papery spider,” but “she scared me / And I smashed her / I don’t think / I’m allowed / To kill something / Because I am / Frightened.”
The poem’s contemplative tone and accrual of shame and regret resonate with Merton’s commentary on our thoughtless desecration of the natural world. At times, I was caught off guard by his disdain for humankind. “The clouds are high and enormous. In them, the inevitable jet plane passes,” he observes, “this time probably full of fat passengers from Miami to Chicago, but presently it will be a plane with the bomb in it.” Such passages stress the urgency of quelling our impulse to harm each other and the nonhuman others in our midst, who are themselves imbued with their own will and right to live. As Giovanni’s title indicates, we must disallow such a mindset and create anew our sick, distracted, noisy consumer society. What would Merton think of today’s climate crisis and the madness of social media?
***
Above all, Merton dwells on the majesty of the natural world. Up and about before dawn each morning, he describes the awakening day in beautiful prose-poetry. “Sunrise: hidden by pines and cedars to the east: I saw the red flame of the kingly sun glaring through the black trees, not like dawn but like a forest fire. Then the sun became distinguished as a person and he shone silently and with solemn power through the branches, and the whole world was silent and calm.” He also writes lyrically of the moon. “The moon was beautiful, dimly red like a globe of almost transparent amber, with a shapeless foetus of darkness curled in the midst of it. It hung there between two tall pines, silent, unexplained, small, with a modest suggestion of bloodiness, an omen without fierceness and without comment, pure.” When was the last time I looked at the moon while outdoors? On clear nights, I peer up through our windows and exclaim over the moon’s brightness and beauty, but I don’t step outside to view it. I berate myself and promise I’ll start.
I return to especially arresting ideas, such as, “The year struggles with its own blackness.” He means it literally, noting dark skies and incessant rain that he contrasts with a bright New Year’s Day. Yet I find the sentence a supremely apt metaphor for the last five years in America. I read with pencil in hand and bracket especially lovely or thought-provoking passages. I stop short at one sentence in particular. “After None I sat in one of the windows of the Scriptorium . . . and watched the rain.” After I graduated from college, my parents moved into a newly built house, and at long last, my father had a spacious home office all to himself. It had skylights, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a Persian rug, and a beautiful Amish-made desk. He dubbed the room the Scriptorium. I have no idea if he chose the name because of Merton, but seeing the word Scriptorium made me smile, and another piece of the puzzle clicked into place.
It’s clear from Merton’s nature writings that he travelled quite a bit. He notes shadows cast by buildings on the pavement in New York City. He mentions New Mexico many times and the vistas of coastal California. I’m guessing the None of the above-mentioned Scriptorium quote refers to the one in Italy. I envy his travel to fascinating locales, his profound knowledge of the woods, birds, and animals, and his rising before dawn to feel the air and wind, and to gaze at the starlit sky. Several times, he mentions both the serenity and the excitement of sheltering under a tree during a rainstorm. When I was a kid, my friends and I used to rush outside during downpours and turn our faces up to the sky. We’d play games in the rain and run around laughing, getting soaked to the bone. Why did we ever stop?
Interested in knowing more about Merton, I head to the internet. I learn that he died by accidental electrocution on December 10, 1968, in Bangkok—27 years to the day after he entered Gethsemani. He was 53 years old and had traveled to Bangkok to continue his studies in eastern spiritual traditions. Some theories hold that he was assassinated due to his opposition to the Vietnam War. Others say he may have had a heart attack. Suddenly, a passage from When the Trees Say Nothing assumes a haunting new significance. “Clear, thin new moon appearing and disappearing blue clouds—and the living black skeletons of the trees against the evening sky. More artillery than usual whumping at Knox. It is my fifty-third birthday.” He has less than a year to live.
***
A December 2018 New Yorker profile of Merton recounts his problematic early years. He went to Cambridge University, drank to excess, landed in and out of jail, and fathered a child he never met. He was eventually expelled and went on to Columbia University, where he found his vocation. “He was his contradictions,” writes Alan Jacobs in “Thomas Merton: The Monk Who Became a Prophet”: “the person in motion who seeks stillness; the monk who wants to belong to the world; the famous person who wants to be unknown. . . . He sought the peace of pure and silent contemplation, but came to believe that the value of that experience is to send us back into the world that killed us.” Maybe he would have gravitated toward social media more than I initially imagined, for “He is perhaps the proper patron saint of our information-saturated age,” Jacobs goes on, “of we who live and move and have our being in social media, and then, desperate for peace and rest, withdraw into privacy and silence, only to return. As we always will.” Merton of course recognized his contradictions. “To be conscious of both extremes of my solitary life,” he muses; “consolation and desolation; understanding, obscurity; obedience and protest; freedom and imprisonment.”
This issue of The New Yorker came out on December 18, 2018, three days before my father passed away. I wish he could have read it. He would have loved it and would surely have recommended that I read it, too—and I would have. (I have my own New Yorker subscription but missed that issue, having had other things on my mind that week.) We could have talked about the article together, and perhaps then I would have asked him to tell me more about Merton’s influence upon him, about his visits to Gethsemani, and about any other topics that might have arisen. But it was not to be.
At the start of this essay, I claimed to have eagerly opened When the Trees Say Nothing. That’s true. At the same time, I read it with trepidation as I knew it would trigger an emotional whirlwind—and so it did. Over and over, one question clanged and wailed in my head: “Why didn’t I read this, and Seven Storey Mountain, years ago when Dad was alive so that we could talk about them together?” Once I go down that rabbit hole, I find it hard to climb out. I then remember other things, like his telling me, all my life, that his favorite movie was How Green Was My Valley, a 1941 film about a Welsh mining family. Such a description did little to entice me back in the day, and I never watched it. Still haven’t. Why not? Would it have killed me to sit down with my dad and roll the movie? He would have been delighted. Since he died, all the could haves and should haves have stacked up into a tall, menacing tower.
***
Born and raised in Green Bay, Wisconsin, my father relished the cold and snow. When our family woke up on the morning of January 26, 1978, to more than two feet of snow on the ground, he was like a kid in a candy store. He was so excited and couldn’t wait to get outside, where he walked and shoveled and hiked for hours and hours each day over the next few weeks. That may have been the winter he took a hose to our backyard and made an ice rink for us. Every day, my brother, sister, and I skated and played hockey until it grew too dark out to see. I think of the snowy days at my parents’ house over the holidays when I was an adult and all the times my father and I could have gone for a walk together. I had so many opportunities to get to know him better, and I stupidly, selfishly let them slip through my fingers. These are the thoughts that have me on my knees howling into the abyss.
I expressed as much in an email to my friend Erica when she asked why I was writing about Merton. I treasure her insightful and sensitive response. “I can imagine you've told yourself this before,” she wrote in an email, “but I will attempt it in my own words anyway. You have Thomas Merton now so that you can still be in conversation with your father. You didn't need these books when your father was alive because you had your father. You need his writing now as a way to be with your dad in his physical absence perhaps? A shallow consolation, I am sure, but that is immediately what came to mind when I read your email. In fact, Merton's words are likely your father's way of providing comfort to you in this time of personal grief and global uncertainty.” I hold these reassuring sentiments close as I think of my parents, delve deeper into Merton, and learn a bit about Buddhist teachings on death, grief, and the importance of self-compassion.
Dry January didn’t take, and I’m back on Twitter (only to return…as we always will), but tomorrow is another day—and one day, I will read The Seven Storey Mountain and strive to learn and grow from it as I have from When the Trees Say Nothing. I would hate for the books my mother and father loved to become totems of regret and remorse. Instead, I can appreciate them as benevolent presences beckoning from the shelves, inviting me to commune with my parents by reading what they read, and to feel them within and around me.
Kristin Czarnecki is the author of the memoir The First Kristin: The Story of a Naming. She has published personal essays, poetry, and literary criticism in a variety of venues and has a chapbook forthcoming from dancing girl press. She is an English professor at Georgetown College and past president of the International Virginia Woolf Society.
Bibliography
Giovanni, Nikki. “Allowables.” Get Lit Anthology 2013. Web.
Jacobs, Alan. “Thomas Merton: The Monk Who Became a Prophet.” The New Yorker 18 Dec. 2018.
Merton, Thomas. When the Trees Say Nothing: Writings on Nature. Ed. Kathleen Deignan. Sorin Books, 2003.
