Word: gethsemani
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Branch went to all the offices, saying they gave him "ballast and steerage." It's a routine he says he would follow if he went back. But not everyone begging for reservations at the Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky (wait: one year), or New Camaldoli Hermitage, California (wait: six months, only because they refuse to book any further), is so sincere. The problem is not an entirely new one. The earliest monasteries were founded in the 4th century in the Egyptian desert. As Christianity became legalized and then haute, the Desert Fathers and Mothers found themselves overrun by hipsters from Alexandria...
...Brother Matthew locked the gate behind me, and I was enclosed in the four walls of my new freedom." Thus in his bestselling autobiography did Thomas Merton describe the moment he arrived to become a postulant at Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey in rural Kentucky. It was the Advent season of 1941, three days after Pearl Harbor. By eerie coincidence, Dec. 10 was also the date of Merton's mysterious 1968 death. As the anniversary of his death and religious birth came round again this Christmas season, Merton disciples were enjoying a host of new material on the modern...
...little-known New York writer and teacher whose life had been rakish though not quite dissolute, he converted from irreligion to Catholicism at 23 and stunned friends three years later by joining the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, commonly known as Trappists. The monks of Gethsemani lived on prayer, hard manual toil, vegetables and little else. Under the rule of silence, all conversation was forbidden...
...never write again!" his literary agent said. But seven years after disappearing behind Gethsemani's walls, Merton produced The Seven Storey Mountain. The autobiography of conversion sold 300,000 copies in less than a year (more than 3 million as of 1984). That book was followed by 60 other volumes of meditations, poems, essays, criticism, history, translations, drawings and photographs. For masses of readers Brother Louis, as he was called by the Trappists, redefined the image of monasticism and made the concept of saintliness accessible to moderns. His treatise on meditation, New Seeds of Contemplation (1962), was deemed...
...Gethsemani, Merton was given permission to build a modest, cinder-block hermitage in which to write and pray, and to receive a mounting stream of visitors. His message journeyed far beyond the confines of the retreat into a world with which he was finally at ease. The perduring cause was peace - a cause he had first championed in his days at Columbia in the 1930s: peace among races, peace in Viet Nam, peace between the superpowers who were to decide the fate of billions of souls. The irksome discipline of the monastery, Furlong concludes, had given him the freedom...