Forgotten Men

I’ve finished reading Thomas Merton’s history of the Trappist order, The Waters of Siloe (1949 by Harcourt, Brace, and Company, Inc., New York, NY) and have thoroughly enjoyed it. Merton — or Father Louis, as he was known at Gethsemani Abbey — certainly deserved his reputation as a formidable writer.

I wanted to share a couple of sections from this book. One for a rather whimsical reason, and the other a more serious point I wanted to highlight.

First, the whimsical section. I offer these paragraphs from pages 132-133 in hopes that my friend Francis Berger might see them:

We can see what was the mentality of the monks of Gethsemani by their actual choice [of abbot]. They did not want a promoter, a businessman, at their head, even though he might be a good Trappist. They were not concerned about money and financial security before everything else.

Their choice fell upon the austere Breton who had been one of the first to make his vows at the monastery. In electing Dom Benedict Berger, the monks of Gethsemani were fully aware of what kind of abbot they were going to have. They knew what that Napoleonic chin and those steely eyes represented. But they wanted this strict, uncompromising disciplinarian because they knew that he would be a ruthless defender of the rigor of the Rule. Perhaps he would be a hard superior; but one feels that most of the monks were all the happier for it. They were Trappists.

But beyond their concern for the welfare for their own individual souls, they were thinking of the survival of the monastery and of the Cistercian life in Kentucky. For that, it was all important that Gethsemani should have an abbot who would devote his whole life to maintaining the Benedictine regime of prayer, manual labor, and contemplative reading, together with the fasting and poverty and austerity and penance and monastic obedience in all their original purity.

Dom Benedict Berger ruled the monastery for twenty-nine years. And he really ruled it. He stayed with his monks and kept his finger on everything that went on.

Napoleonic chin and steely eyes, Francis. Napoleonic chin and steely eyes. I like it.

And now for something that did not make me smile. On pages 136-137, we read

Among the American postulants who thought of becoming Trappists at Gethsemani during Dom Benedict’s administration, the most colorful, by far, was a certain Joseph Dutton. Recently converted to the faith, this man had led the kind of life that legend generally tacks on to Trappists. Born of Protestant farmers in Vermont, he had fought in the Union army in the Civil War. He had been unhappily married, then divorced. After that, he had gone through years of misery, drinking and gambling and ruining his life altogether. In the early 1880’s he turned up in Memphis, where his reputation earned him, strangely enough, a romantic popularity. With a view to marrying the daughter of a Catholic family in that city, he had begun to take instructions in the faith. Then, soon after his Baptism, he suddenly vanished. Word came back that he had entered Gethsemani.

He remained in the monastery for twenty months. One day, toward the end of his novitiate, he was mowing hay in St.Mary’s field, in front of the abbey, when a runaway horse came galloping down the road. The rider, a young girl, fell off as the horse went by. He picked her up and carried her to the monks’ school. When he left the monastery a few months later, the rumor went around that he had gone off to marry her…

In reality, Dutton left Gethsemani for a very solid reason. The monks, who were accustomed to write remarks in the records of entries and departures, seldom had any admiration for those who left. There is only one exception — Joseph Dutton. he went off to join the heroic Father Damien in his leper colony at Molokai, in the Pacific. It turned out that this was his real vocation. He became the close friend and one of the chief supports of the leper-priest and lived on Molokai for forty-four years — until he was well over eighty. It was a life of much harsher and more terrible penances than anything known at Gethsemani, even under Dom Benedict Berger.

This section was one of those surprise jewels for me, like the section I highlighted in an earlier blog post where I learned that a character from a Horatio Hornblower novel was an actual historical figure. The name of Father Damien immediately arrested my attention, because my admiration for this poor priest is deep and intense. I’ve read two biographies of the man, and merely thinking about the life of virtue he live among the castoffs of the earth is enough to make me shake my head in wonder. And here we read of this interesting monk, Joseph Dutton, who did something most people today would consider “throwing his life away” (as so many people think of the life of anyone who enters a monastery or a convent).

I’ve personally known several people who decided they were “called to the mission field” and yet left missionary work after a year or two or five. Without exception, the people I’ve known who fall into this category returned to the USA and entered lucrative careers. I’ve known countless Christians who go on two-week “mission trips” to third-world countries (where I suspect they are more of a burden than a help to the real missionaries). I am grateful for those men and women who burn their lives out on hard mission fields or enter cloistered life and stay until death…the ones who intentionally become forgotten, except to God. The ones who intentionally hide themselves in Christ, the ones who fast and labor and read and arise in the middle of the night and stand in cold, still chapels and sing the ancient chants and pray for men like me.

~ S.K. Orr