Word: trappists
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...century ago, the tiny vessel Brunswick sailed from the French port of Le Havre for New Orleans with a mixed human cargo. Of its 180 passengers, 60 were ordinary German immigrants, 80 were pre-Marxist communists who called themselves Icarians, and the other 40 were communists who called themselves Trappist monks. The Icarians were coming to the U.S. to build a materialist Utopia, the Trappists to build a monastery where they could contemplate God. The last Icarian Utopia, at Cloverdale, Calif., fizzled out in 1895. Today in the U.S., there are six Trappist monasteries where some 500 monks dwell "above...
...Waters of Siloe ("waters of Siloe* that flow in silence" - Isaiah 8 : 6) is Thomas Merton's history of the Trappists since the founding of their order in the 12th Century. For an authorized account, the book has moments of uncommon candor. According to Merton, the history of many 17th Century Trappist monasteries "was nothing but a series of petty and sordid intrigues." Forgotten was the strict, humble, ascetic life once outlined by St. Benedict. "The monks . . . had all the comforts of the upper class, with servants and feather beds in their own private apartments." By the 18th Century...
Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions; $3) is already riding to a whacking success in the high-altitude wake of an earlier book, The Seven Storey Mountain (TIME, Oct. 11), by the same young Trappist monk. Both books are the work of 34-year-old Thomas Merton, who has retired from the world to live under a monastic rule so strict that it forbids even the self-indulgence of talking. Trendspotters have begun to wonder whether some of the U.S. reading public, in its search for peace, subconsciously wishes it could follow...
Halfhearted Search. "America," Trappist Merton has written, "is discovering the contemplative life." British Novelist Evelyn Waugh- supports such a possibility. In a letter to Author Merton, Waugh said: "I believe there are thousands of men and women in the world who are temperamentally suited to monastic life but have no effective vocation simply because they are ignorant of the very existence of religious life. Indeed, a thesis might be developed to show that the health of society depends on a right balance between monks and laymen-the revolution of the 14th Century took place because the monasteries were full...
...that Protestants and Jews are buying it from us more than Catholics." But Georgia bookdealers do not see this as evidence of the South's yearning for the contemplative life. The booming sales are rather attributed to Protestant curiosity about behind-the-scenes Catholic activities-especially within a Trappist monastery...