I went to the novitiate chapel and prayed.
But after dinner I found out that it was true. John Paul was sitting in his room, quiet and happy. It was years since I had seen him so completely serene.
Then I realized, obscurely, that in those last four days the work of eighteen or twenty years of my bad example had been washed away and made good by God’s love. The evil that had been done by my boasting and showing off and exulting in my own stupidity had been atoned for in my own soul, at the same time as it had been washed out of his, and I was full of peace and gratitude.
I taught him how to use a Missal and how to receive Communion, for it had been arranged that his First Communion would be at Reverend Father’s private Mass the following day.
The next morning, all through Chapter, the obscure worry that John Paul would get lost and not be able to find his way down to the chapel of Our Lady of Victories had been haunting me. As soon as Chapter was over I hurried to the church ahead of Reverend Father, and entered the big empty building, and knelt down.
John Paul was nowhere in sight.
I turned around. At the end of the long nave, with its empty choir stalls, high up in the empty Tribune, John Paul was kneeling all alone, in uniform. He seemed to be an immense distance away, and between the secular church where he was, and the choir where I was, was a locked door, and I couldn’t call out to him to tell him how to come down the long way ’round through the Guest House. And he didn’t understand my sign.
At that moment there flashed into my mind all the scores of times in our forgotten childhood when I had chased John Paul away with stones from the place where my friends and I were building a hut. And now, all of a sudden, here it was all over again: a situation that was externally of the same pattern: John Paul, standing, confused and unhappy, at a distance which he was not able to bridge.
Sometimes the same image haunts me now that he is dead, as though he were standing helpless in Purgatory, depending more or less on me to get him out of there, waiting for my prayers. But I hope he is out of it by now!
Father Master went off to get him and I started lighting the candles on the altar of Our Lady of Victories and by the time the Mass started I could see, out of the corner of my eye, that he was kneeling there at one of the benches. And so we received Communion together, and the work was done.
The next day, he was gone. I went to see him off at the Gate, after Chapter. A visitor gave him a ride to Bardstown. As the car was turning around to start down the avenue John Paul turned around and waved, and it was only then that his expression showed some possibility that he might be realizing, as I did, that we would never see each other on earth again.
The fall came, and the Great Tricenary in September when all the young monks have to recite ten psalters for the dead. It is a season of bright, dry days, with plenty of sun, and cool air, and high cirrus clouds, and the forest is turning rusty and blood color and bronze along the jagged hills. Then, morning and afternoon, we go out to cut corn. St. Joseph’s field had long been finished—the green stalks had gone into the silo. Now we were working through the vast, stony fields in the middle and lower bottoms, hacking our way through the dry corn with each blow of the knife cracking like a rifle shot. It was as if those glades had turned into shooting galleries and we were all firing away with twenty-twos.
And behind us, in the wide avenues that opened in our wake, the giant shocks grew up, and the two novices that came last garrotted them with a big rope and tied them secure with twine.
Around November when the corn-husking was nearly finished, and when the fat turkeys were gobbling loudly in their pen, running from one wire fence to the other in dark herds, under the gloomy sky, I got news from John Paul in England. First he had been stationed at Bournemouth, from which he sent me a postcard that showed some boarding houses I recognized, along the West Cliff. It was only ten years since we had spent a summer there: but the memory of it was like something unbelievable, like another life—as if there were some such thing as the transmigration of souls!
After that he was sent somewhere in Oxfordshire. His letters arrived with little rectangles neatly cut out of them, here and there, but when he wrote: “I enjoy going into——and seeing the——and the bookstores,” it was easy enough for me to insert “Oxford” in the first hole and “Colleges” in the other, since the postmark read “Banbury.” Here he was still in training. I could not tell how soon he would get in to the actual fighting over Germany.
Meanwhile, he wrote that he had met a girl, whom he described, and it soon turned out that they were going to get married. I was glad on account of the marriage, but there was something altogether pathetic about the precariousness of it: what chance was there that they would ever be able to have a home and live in it, the way human beings were supposed to do?
Christmas came to the monastery bringing with it the same kind of graces and consolations as the year before, only more intense. On the Feast of St. Thomas the Apostle, Reverend Father had allowed me to make my vows privately to him, more than a year before public profession would be permissible. If I had been able to make ten different vows every day I would not have been able to express what I felt about the monastery and the Cistercian life.
And so 1943 began, and the weeks hastened on towards Lent.
Lent means, among other things, no more letters. The monks neither receive mail nor write it in Lent and Advent, and the last news I had, before Ash Wednesday, was that John Paul was planning to get married about the end of February. I would have to wait until Easter to find out whether or not he actually did.
I had fasted a little during my first Lent, the year before, but it had been broken up by nearly two weeks in the infirmary. This was my first chance to go through the whole fast without any mitigation. In those days, since I still had the world’s ideas about food and nourishment and health, I thought the fast we have in Trappist monasteries in Lent was severe. We eat nothing until noon, when we get the regular two bowls, one of soup and the other of vegetables, and as much bread as we like, but then in the evening there is a light collation—a piece of bread and a dish of something like applesauce—two ounces of it.
However, if I had entered a Cistercian monastery in the twelfth century—or even some Trappist monasteries of the nineteenth, for that matter—I would have had to tighten my belt and go hungry until four o’clock in the afternoon: and there was nothing besides that one meal: no collation, no frustulum.
Humiliated by this discovery, I find that the Lenten fast we now have does not bother me. However, it is true that now in the morning work periods I have a class in theology, instead of going out to break rocks on the back road, or split logs in the woodshed as we did in the novitiate. I expect it makes a big difference, because swinging a sledgehammer when you have an empty stomach is apt to make your knees a little shaky after a while. At least that was what it did to me.
Even in the Lent of 1943, however, I had some indoor work for part of the time, since Reverend Father had already put me to translating books and articles from French.
And so, after the Conventual Mass, I would get out book and pencil and papers and go to work at one of the long tables in the novitiate scriptorium, filling the yellow sheets as fast as I could, while another novice took them and typed them as soon as they were finished. In those days I even had a secretary.
Finally the long liturgy of penance came to its climax in Holy Week, with the terrible cry of the Lamentations once more echoing in the dark choir of the Abbey Church, followed by the four hours’ thunder of the Good Friday Psalter in the Chapter Room, and the hush of the monks going about the cloisters in bare feet, and the long sad chant that accompanies the adoration of the Cross!
What a relief it was to hear the bells once more on Holy Saturday, what relief to wake up from the sleep of death with a triple “alleluia.” Easter, that year, was as late as it could possibly be—the twenty-fifth of April—and there were enough flowers to fill the church with the int
oxicating smell of the Kentucky spring—a wild and rich and heady smell of flowers, sweet and full. We came from our light, five hours’ sleep into a church that was full of warm night air and swimming in this rich luxury of odors, and soon began that Easter invitatory that is nothing short of gorgeous in its exultation.
How mighty they are, those hymns and those antiphons of the Easter office! Gregorian chant that should, by rights, be monotonous, because it has absolutely none of the tricks and resources of modern music, is full of a variety infinitely rich because it is subtle and spiritual and deep, and lies rooted far beyond the shallow level of virtuosity and “technique,” even in the abysses of the spirit, and of the human soul. Those Easter “alleluias,” without leaving the narrow range prescribed by the eight Gregorian modes, have discovered color and warmth and meaning and gladness that no other music possesses. Like everything else Cistercian—like the monks themselves—these antiphons, by submitting to the rigor of a Rule that would seem to destroy individuality, have actually acquired a character that is unique, unparalleled.
It was into the midst of all this that news from England came.
There had been a letter from John Paul among the two or three that I found under the napkin in the refectory at noon on Holy Saturday. I read it on Easter Monday, and it said that he had been married more or less according to plan, and had gone with his wife to the English Lakes for a week or so, and that after that he had been stationed at a new base, which put him into the fighting.
He had been once or twice to bomb something somewhere: but he did not even give the censor a chance to cut anything out. You could see at once that there was a tremendous change in his attitude towards the war and his part in it. He did not want to talk about it. He had nothing to say. And from the way he said that he didn’t want to talk about it, you could see that the experience was terrific.
John Paul had at last come face to face with the world that he and I had helped to make!
On Easter Monday afternoon I sat down to write him a letter and cheer him up a little, if I could.
The letter was finished, and it was Easter Tuesday, and we were in choir for the Conventual Mass, when Father Master came in and made me the sign for “Abbot.”
I went out to Reverend Father’s room. There was no difficulty in guessing what it was.
I passed the pietà at the corner of the cloister, and buried my will and my natural affections and all the rest in the wounded side of the dead Christ.
Reverend Father flashed the sign to come in, and I knelt by his desk and received his blessing and kissed his ring and he read me the telegram that Sergeant J. P. Merton, my brother, had been reported missing in action on April 17th.
I have never understood why it took them so long to get the telegram through. April 17th was already ten days ago—the end of Passion Week.
Some more days went by, letters of confirmation came, and finally, after a few weeks, I learned that John Paid was definitely dead.
The story was simply this. On the night of Friday the sixteenth, which had been the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, he and his crew had taken off in their bomber with Mannheim as their objective. I never discovered whether they crashed on the way out or the way home, but the plane came down in the North Sea. John Paul was severely injured in the crash, but he managed to keep himself afloat, and even tried to support the pilot, who was already dead. His companions had managed to float their rubber dinghy and pulled him in.
He was very badly hurt: maybe his neck was broken. He lay in the bottom of the dinghy in delirium.
He was terribly thirsty. He kept asking for water. But they didn’t have any. The water tank had broken in the crash, and the water was all gone.
It did not last too long. He had three hours of it, and then he died. Something of the three hours of the thirst of Christ Who loved him, and died for him many centuries ago, and had been offered again that very day, too, on many altars.
His companions had more of it to suffer, but they were finally picked up and brought to safety. But that was some five days later.
On the fourth day they had buried John Paul in the sea.
Sweet brother, if I do not sleep
My eyes are flowers for your tomb;
And if I cannot eat my bread,
My fasts shall live like willows where you died.
If in the beat I find no water for my thirst,
My thirst shall turn to springs for you, poor traveller
Where, in what desolate and smokey country,
Lies your poor body, lost and dead?
And in what landscape of disaster
Has your unhappy spirit lost its road?
Come, in my labor find a resting place
And in my sorrows lay your head,
Or rather take my life and blood
And buy yourself a better bed—
Or take my breath and take my death
And buy yourself a better rest.
When all the men of war are shot
And flags have fallen into dust,
Your cross and mine shall tell men still
Christ died on each, for both of us.
For in the wreckage of your April Christ lies slain,
And Christ weeps in the ruins of my spring:
The money of Whose tears shall fall
Into your weak and friendless hand,
And buy you back to your own land:
The silence of Whose tears shall fall
Like bells upon your alien tomb.
Hear them and come: they call you home.
EPILOGUE
MEDITATIO PAUPERIS IN SOLITUDINE
DAY UNTO DAY UTTERETH SPEECH. THE CLOUDS CHANGE. The seasons pass over our woods and fields in their slow and regular procession, and time is gone before you are aware of it.
Christ pours down the Holy Ghost upon you from heaven in the fire of June, and then you look about you and realize that you are standing in the barnyard husking corn, and the cold wind of the last days of October is sweeping across the thin woods and biting you to the bone. And then, in a minute or so, it is Christmas, and Christ is born.
At the last of the three great Masses, celebrated as a Solemn Pontifical High Mass with Pontifical Tierce, I am one of the minor ministers. We have vested in the Sacristy, have waited in the sanctuary. In the thunder of the organ music, Reverend Father has come with the monks in procession through the cloister, and has knelt a moment before the Blessed Sacrament in the Chapel of Our Lady of Victories. Then Tierce begins. After that the solemn vesting and I present the crozier with the suitable bows, and they go to the foot of the altar and the tremendous introit begins, in the choir, summing up with the splendor of its meaning the whole of Christmas. The Child born on earth, in lowliness, in the crib, before the shepherds, is born this day in heaven in glory, in magnificence, in majesty: and the day in which He is born is eternity. He is born forever, All-Power, All-Wisdom, begotten before the day-star: He is the beginning and the end, everlastingly born of the Father, the Infinite God: and He Himself is the same God, God of God, Light of Light, True God of True God. God born of Himself, forever: Himself His own second Person: One, yet born of Himself forever.
He it is also that is born each instant in our hearts: for this unending birth, this everlasting beginning, without end, this everlasting, perfect newness of God begotten of Himself, issuing from Himself without leaving Himself or altering His one-ness, this is the life that is in us. But see: He is suddenly born again, also, on this altar, upon that cloth and corporal as white as snow beneath the burning lights, and raised up above us in the hush of the consecration! Christ, the Child of God, the Son, made Flesh, with His All-power. What will You say to me, this Christmas, O Jesus? What is it that You have prepared for me at Your Nativity?
At the Agnus Dei I put aside the crozier and we all go to the Epistle side, together, to receive the kiss of peace. We bow to one another. The salutation passes from one to the other. Heads bow. Hands are folded again. Now we
all turn around together.
And suddenly I find myself looking straight into the face of Bob Lax. He is standing at the benches that are drawn up, there, for visitors. He is so close to the step of the sanctuary, that if he were any closer he would be in it.
And I say to myself: “Good, now he’ll get baptized too.”
After dinner I went to Reverend Father’s room and told him who Lax was, and that he was an old friend of mine, and asked if I might speak to him. We are ordinarily only allowed to receive visits from our own families, but since I had practically nothing left of my family, Reverend Father agreed that I might speak to Lax for a little while. And I mentioned that I thought he might be ready to be baptized.
“Isn’t he a Catholic?” said Reverend Father.
“No, Reverend Father, not yet.”
“Well, in that case, why was he taking Communion last night at the midnight Mass?...”
Up in the Guest House, Lax told me how the Baptism had come about. He had been at the University of North Carolina teaching some earnest young men how to write radio plays. Towards the end of Advent he had got a letter from Rice which said, in so many words, “Come to New York and we will find a priest and ask him to baptize you.”
All of a sudden, after all those years of debating back and forth, Lax just got on the train and went to New York. Nobody had ever put the matter up to him like that before.
They found a Jesuit in that big church up on Park Avenue and he baptized him, and that was that.
So then Lax had said: “Now I will go to the Trappists in Kentucky and visit Merton.”
Bob Gibney told him: “You were a jew and now you are a Catholic. Why don’t you black your face? Then you will be all the three things the Southerners hate most.”
The night had already fallen, Christmas Eve, when Lax got to Bardstown. He stood by the road to hitch a ride to the monastery. Some fellows picked him up, and while they were driving along, they began talking about the Jews the way some people talk about the Jews.