really alone companion whose writings still speak to me today. It is 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 and drawings. So the opportunity to spend some time in solitude in a hermitage at the Abbey was shot through with significance for me. My hermitage for the week was located less than a mile from the monastery next to a beautiful little lake. Apart from the tolling of the bells at the monastery and the sounds of fish jumping and turtles and otters swimming in the lake, there was no noise. I woke each day around 5:30 and spent each day in almost total solitude, apart from the occasional walk up to the monastery for mass or a meal. I went for hikes. I napped. I prayed. And I read Merton. 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.” 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 confronting our own complexity, which we must do 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 Most of us have such self-knowledge can only occur in solitude, for solitude strips us of the usual grown accustomed a path not usually taken.attachments and distractions of life, and leads us within. If you’re like me, this is to finding ways to quiet and the natural beauty that surrounded me, I found myself at various pointsThe last three days at the hermitage were not easy for me. While I enjoyed the avoid ourselves, to profoundly lonely and restless. When I mentioned this to one of the monks, he avoid confronting elaborate, but it seems to me that the general sense of unease I felt over the last halfremarked that it was very healthy to experience such things in solitude. He didn’t our own complexity, of my retreat was a necessary part of truly experiencing the kind of transformativesolitude Merton describes. which we must do This short time of solitude made me even more thankful for the gift of my if we are to come family and friends. 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 to self-knowledge. I look forward to my next stay at the hermitage.means of opening one’s self to the transforming love of God. Despite the challenges, winter 2013 39
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