Friday, February 7, 2025
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Gethsemani
Do not neglect hospitality, for through it some have unknowingly entertained angels.
On the gate which opens into the Abbey of Gethsemani hangs a sign: “Only God.”
In the fourth century, Benedict founded the first European monastery. In the rules set out for the monks Benedict wrote, “Let all guests be received as Christ.” Inside the always-open door to the guesthouse at the Abbey of Gethsemani, this verse hangs on the wall.
Margaret, our pastor Jeff, Margaret and I visited the Abbey of Gethsemani in spring, 2013. Forty miles south of Louisville, Kentucky, the Trappist abbey opened its doors in 1848, looking back on history first as Benedictines, then Cistercians, and now Trappists. We spent most of a week there in silence, eating the fresh bread, cheese and fruitcake that the monks make in the barns and fields of the Abbey.
During 2012 and 2013 I belonged to the sixth cohort of Ruth Haley Barton’s Transforming Community. Ruth hosted a three day retreat every three months, and one of the retreats came two weeks after we returned from Gethsemani. The required reading for our retreats included books by Thomas Merton, who spent 27 years at the Abbey of Gethsemani, some of which became bestsellers. Although he never left the abbey, many folks visited him, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, the Dalai Lama, and Henri Nouwen.
In an essay, “A Member of the Human Race,” Merton wrote of a moment in Louisville, where he traveled occasionally to receive medical treatment for his aching back.
In Louisville at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs … it was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. I suppose my happiness could have taken form in the words, “Thanks God, thank God that I AM like other men.”
Whatever Pharisaical mind Merton had been infected with fell away in that moment. In our TC cohort we read his books – great books like Thoughts in Solitude, New Seeds of Contemplation and No Man Is An Island. Later I read parts of his seven books of journals, one of which has the transparent title, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.
Henri Nouwen visited Merton twice before Nouwen began writing his own spiritual masterpieces. Since 1989 when Don Follis introduced me to the books of Henri Nouwen at our first retreat together, Thomas Merton’s writing and personal example have lifted me time after time out of spiritual lethargy into hope, into exultation.
At the Abbey our simple single rooms held a small bookcase, a desk and a single bed, soft enough but not too soft. One morning I got up a little after sunrise and walked outside. A single red cardinal perched on the abbey wall. The cardinal didn’t move, and neither did I. I felt the cardinal’s freedom to fly away, and in that moment I felt more free myself to fly, up into the arms of God. No need for physical wings, my body rising up in the Kentucky sky by spirit. In this gated community where the monks prayed every few hours every day of the year, where they stayed and did not leave, I felt oh so free.
Later I walked into the woods and spent a few hours at the hermitage Merton convinced his abbot to build for him. I walked in a plush field of goldenrod. I sat in his chair on the front porch. I looked through the window to see his writing table and imagined I saw him, looking back at me. “I’m on to something at the moment,” he might have said. “Could you come back a little later, and we’ll have a beer together?”
On Thursday I took a field trip alone, first to the nearby Maker’s Mark distillery for a tour, where four Baptist ladies gave me their samples because they didn’t drink whiskey! I visited Springfield College which has a working relationship with Wendell Berry, and attended mass at a church my nun friend told me contained the most garish, ugly sanctuary she had ever seen.
At the church I spent an hour with an older Christian worker confined to a wheelchair, who shared stories of the parish he served for forty years. I lifted a copy of the parish history from a pile sitting by the door. It still sits in my study in Urbana, waiting to, now and then, be perused and remembered.
Blessed are they who have kept the word with a generous heart and yield a harvest through perseverance. Remember your leaders who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.
I will not forget the hospitality in this “Catholic Cradle of Kentucky” (also nicknamed the Kentucky Holy Land). As memories flood my mind, I am thankful.
The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
(Hebrews 13, Psalm 27, Luke 8, Mark 6)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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