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Merton's hermitage |
The days go by and I am beginning to experience the meaning of real solitude. It is certainly real enough now…I am beginning to feel the lightness, the strangeness, the desertedness of being really alone…Now that everything is here, the work of loneliness really begins, and I feel it. I glory in it (giving thanks to God), and I fear it. This is not something lightly to be chosen (Dancing in the Water of Life (vol. 5 of The Journals of Thomas Merton), p. 286).
Merton was expressing here the suffering that is a
necessary part of solitude, the kind of suffering experienced by the many men
and women before him who had themselves chosen the solitary life, and Merton’s
journals throughout his three years of life at the hermitage frequently evoke
the difficulties associated with being alone.
I, like so many others, lead a busy life. In addition to my position as Assistant
Professor of Theology and Director of the Master of Arts in Spirituality
program here at Bellarmine, I am a husband and a father to three young boys –
aged seven, four, and one. When all
three boys are awake, our house is LOUD!
But I love the noise, I love the chaos, and I love their energy. And I love these boys. I love who they are as individuals and I love
how their very presence in my life makes me a better person.

This was a pilgrimage of sorts for me. I first read Thomas Merton’s autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain
,
when I was 23,
and the experience was transformational. As
so many do at that age, I was having something of a vocational crisis as I
contemplated what I wanted to do with my life, and it was immensely comforting
for me to read the experiences of one who was as confused as I was and yet
found his calling in life. I started to
read everything I could get my hands on by and about Merton, and he became for
me something of a spiritual companion whose writings continue to speak to me
today.
It is still wonderfully surreal for me to think that,
so many years after first coming under Merton’s influence, I now teach at
Bellarmine University, which houses the Merton Center, the official repository
of his manuscripts, letters, journals, drawings, etc. So the opportunity to spend some time in
solitude in a hermitage at the Abbey was one shot through with significance for
me.
My view from the hermitage |
For the first three days I reveled in the
silence. I wrote in my journal that I
could “almost literally hear my mind quieting down” as I entered into the
solitude of the place.
But I also experienced, albeit less profoundly than
Merton (I was, after all, going home after a week), “the lightness, the
strangeness, the desertedness of being really alone” to which he refers in his
August 28th journal entry. I
learned that it is disconcerting to be alone with one’s own thoughts for an
extended period of time. Most of us have
grown accustomed to finding ways to avoid ourselves, to avoid having to
confront our own complexity into which we have to plunge if we are to come to
self-knowledge. Merton frequently wrote
about the necessity of discovering the true self that lies hidden beneath the
false self, the masks that we wear that obscure our true identity from
ourselves and others. And he stressed
that such self-knowledge can only occur in solitude. For solitude strips us of the usual
attachments and distractions of life, and leads us within. If you’re like me, this is a path not usually
taken.
My reading chairs at the hermitage |
This short time of solitude made me even more thankful
for the gift my family and friends are to me.
At the same time, it led me to understand Merton a bit more, and more
importantly, to understand the centrality and necessity of solitude as a means
of opening one’s self to the transforming love of God. Despite the challenges, I look forward to my
next stay at the hermitage.
This piece appears in the Winter 2013 edition of Bellarmine Magazine. The article, as it originally appeared in the magazine, can be accessed here.
Below are links to books I mention above.
Below are links to books I mention above.