The Waters of Siloe by Thomas Merton

Author:Thomas Merton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mariner Books

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A Contemplative Order in Two World Wars

ON THE Feast of Our Lady’s Presentation, in November, 1911, a young Frenchman was walking along a footpath through fields and woods in the rolling open country just across the Belgian border. Through the trees he could see the buildings of the monastery. Just as he was about to emerge from the woods, a bell sounded in the little steeple. It was the noon Angelus. He fell on his knees in the middle of the path.

Michael Carlier was not yet twenty-one, but he had finished his military service, and now he wanted to bury himself in the cloister, to live in silence and prayer, laboring in the fields, fasting, doing penance. Like so many who feel themselves drawn to the Cistercian life, he could not say exactly what it was that brought him there: but it seemed to be the will of God that he should find peace nowhere else but under this roof.

There was little out of the ordinary about this postulant. There have been hundreds like him before and since. But, unlike so many thousands of other members of this silent Order, Michael Carlier—his name in religion was Frater Maxime—has left the world a record of himself.

After he died, his notes and letters were collected and woven together into a book. It is a narrative of deep significance. The story of the vocation and life and sacrifice of Frater Maxime Carlier gives us a better insight than any other document we possess into the real part played by the Cistercians in the wars that have torn apart the world of our time.

Frater Maxime had entered one of the best monasteries in the Order, Notre Dame des Forges, commonly called “Chimay.” The master of novices, Father Anselme le Bail, was a man of deep spirituality and learning who had penetrated far into the theology of the Cistercian writers of the twelfth century. Taking them as his commentators on the Rule of St. Benedict, he had evolved a clear and well-ordered spiritual doctrine, by the light of which he was able to give his novices a more thoroughly Cistercian intellectual formation than they could find anywhere in the Order except, perhaps, at Sept-Fons, where Dom Chautard was abbot.

The novitiate at Chimay was filled with a spirit of balance and sanity; a spirit of simplicity, of clarity; it was eminently Benedictine, and one thing dominated all: the love and service of Christ.

No doubt all these things had been present ever since De Ranch’s reform, but they were buried, cramped in other elements which might have proved dangerous and had, indeed, had bad effects on temperaments like that of Frater Maxime. There were many like him in France. He was intelligent, generous, yet there was something in his nature that tended to warp the spiritual life out of its true direction—a certain rigorism, a harshness that chilled the heart and bred suspicion of God, instead of love. Perhaps there was some germ of Jansenism there that

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