Providence Read online

  Yes, you’re probably right: I still think he should have behaved like a saint. I would say rather that I wish he’d behaved like a saint. I trusted him, took a great risk with him, opened myself up to him, and he dismissed me as a fake. He gave me the kind of reply I would have expected from my father, not the kind of reply I expected from my spiritual director. It hurt me.

  But it didn’t matter as deeply that day as it would have the day before. I had said my yes. I was at Gethsemani to stay.

  This marked the beginning of a new phase of life at Gethsemani, though it lasted only a very short time—a few days at most. I now went out every day with the novices. One day, as I mentioned earlier, we went out to weed a field of tomatoes. Another day, we went to the woodshed to split logs for firewood.

  There I was in my Brooks Brothers sport coat and gray flannel trousers, swinging a mallet. After an hour or so, I was literally staggering with exhaustion and my hands were masses of broken blisters. I was completely out of shape, of course. The monk in charge of the operation—not Father Louis—came over and told me it was time for me to quit. I, the little saint, said, “No, no, I’m all right. I can go on.” Two minutes later, I took a clumsy swing and broke the shaft of the mallet I was using.

  I carried the pieces over to where the monk was standing and said, “I’m sorry. I broke my mallet.”

  “It isn’t your mallet,” he snapped. “It belongs to the community.”

  I tell this story to make the point that I was learning how to make enemies at the monastery. I had no idea how irksome I was being, playing the little saint, courageously and stupidly insisting on working when I was no longer competent to work, when I might easily have injured myself or someone else.

  The monk was perfectly right to rebuke me. I was thinking of the mallet as mine. I was thinking of nothing but myself and how much I was suffering and how noble and heroic I was being, but I was completely unaware that this showed. I was in fact beginning to reveal my true colors; once people began giving me things to do I began to implement my fundamental psychological strategy: If I’m perfect, people will love me. I knew God wanted me to be perfect; Jesus himself had said so: “Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” I was certain that nothing is more lovable than perfection and had no inkling that nothing is more irritating.

  It didn’t matter.

  A couple days after this episode, Father Louis called me into the little cubbyhole he used as an office and told me he had decided I should leave the monastery.

  In an earlier conversation, Father Louis had revealed the fact that he had only recently “discovered” Sigmund Freud. He knew this was an oddity for someone who had moved in sophisticated circles before entering the monastery, but he was perfectly open about it. He had missed out on Freudian thought and was now making up for it.

  One result of his newfound enthusiasm for Freud was that he had instituted a rudimentary sort of psychological screening of monastic candidates: Before admission, they were to take a Rorschach test. He had just now, he told me on this day, received the results of my test, which I’d taken in Omaha a week before leaving for Kentucky.…

  Why do I call it rudimentary? I don’t mean the test is rudimentary. I mean that using it as the sole measure of someone’s psychological status is rudimentary. Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not suggesting it was inadequate. In my case, I’m sure it was more than adequate. Father Louis didn’t describe the results in detail, but it’s not hard to imagine what they were. I was a very insecure and immature young man, terrified of sex, incompetent in personal relations of almost every kind, full of self-doubts, and desperately low in self-esteem, and the Rorschach could hardly have missed all that.

  What the Rorschach indicated, Father Louis said, keeping it simple, was that I had some growing up to do. I said this struck me as unfair—everyone has some growing up to do at age nineteen! He had little choice but to point out that some nineteen-year-olds have more growing up to do than others.

  When it became clear that the decision to send me home wasn’t discussable, that I wasn’t going to be given any chance to prove myself at all, I couldn’t hide the depth of my disappointment. I wanted to, believe me, but there was no holding back the tears.

  I was utterly crushed. I couldn’t have been more wounded if Father Louis had taken out a hammer and hit me on the head. This was a rejection that went beyond any rejection I’d ever known. This was rejection not only by Father Louis, this was rejection by God himself.

  Obviously this was the way I perceived it, not the way Father Louis presented it. He said something like this: “Look, I didn’t ask to be the novice master—or even want to be the novice master—but the abbot asked me to take on this task. Providence has put the disposition of these things into his hands, so I had to conclude that this was what God wanted me to do at this time. A different abbot might have chosen a different novice master, but this abbot is the one we actually have, and he chose me. And because he chose me, the disposition of things pertaining to the novices is in my hands. In other words, Providence has put it into my hands to decide who comes to Gethsemani and who doesn’t and to decide who stays at Gethsemani and who doesn’t.

  Father Louis called me into the little cubbyhole he used as an office and told me he had decided I should leave the monastery.

  “Another novice master might have made a different judgment in your case, but I’m the novice master you actually have, and this is what I judge to be the best thing for you right now. As your spiritual director, I think the best thing for you is to go back out into the world, and you can either shake your fist at the heavens for treating you unfairly or you can accept this as an act of Providence.

  “I’m no more important in the divine scheme of things than you are. I was put here, first, to make sure that you got here and, second, to make sure that you didn’t stay here. As far as I’m concerned, this is what God wanted for you. This says nothing about what he’ll want for you in three years or five years or ten years. If God wants you to come back to Gethsemani, then that’s fine. I’m not banishing you forever, I’m just sending you back out into the world to do a little more growing up.”

  I heard the words, I understood the words, but they couldn’t wipe away my feelings of desolation and abandonment and humiliation. I asked him if I could at least stay till Easter, which was ten or twelve days away, but he didn’t think that was a good idea.…

  What? Of course I felt humiliated! My God, I hadn’t even lasted a month! How was I going to explain this? Was I going to lie and say it was just too tough for me, or was I going to tell the truth and admit that I’d been chucked out? Those were the only explanations I could offer: Either I was a wimp or I was a sicko.

  I’m sitting here wondering if I really need to go through the next two weeks, which were very painful indeed. I suppose I’d better. To leave them out would just be sparing myself.…

  Merton’s enthusiasm for Freudianism was rather like a convert’s. He was sold on it and wanted everyone else to be sold on it. In a word, he thought I should immediately go into psychoanalysis, and he began to make plans for me to do this directly from the monastery. It’s easy enough to see now that he was seriously overreaching when he took it upon himself to operate in this sphere, but I certainly didn’t see it at the time. Psychoanalysis was all he knew about, so naturally it was his answer to every condition and situation. It didn’t matter whether I was a borderline psychotic or just a kid who needed to do some growing up, I needed psychoanalysis. I didn’t agree, but what did I know? This was my spiritual director, and to put myself in his hands was to put myself in the hands of God.

  His enthusiasm for Freudianism was rather like a convert’s. He thought I should immediately go into psychoanalysis whether I was a borderline psychotic or just a kid who needed to do some growing up.

  I moved over to the retreat house, a miserable, depressed exile. The days dragged past. Father Louis was bent on shuttling me directly to the Menninger Clinic
in Topeka. As I say, what did I know? I was in a daze, grieving, stunned.

  I remember one day he dropped by my room in the retreat house with the air of someone making an obligatory visit to death row. I was no longer fully among the living. One day the abbot stopped me in the hall, and I thought he was going to wish me well or to tell me he was sorry things hadn’t worked out for me, but no, he just wanted to make sure I understood I couldn’t use the monastery to hide from the draft; I had to get in touch with the Selective Service as soon as I got home. I told him I understood that, and he turned and walked away without another word.

  When the next retreat broke up on Palm Sunday, I got a ride with one of the retreatants back to the airport. He was clearly eaten up with curiosity about me, about life inside the monastery, and of course especially about why I was leaving. I was not forthcoming. He said he guessed it must be a very tough life. I said, “Yeah.”

  That night I checked into a hotel in Topeka, Kansas. In the morning I reported to the clinic for a battery of tests, which I’m sure laid bare in new and wonderful ways everything I’ve told you and more. The high point came a couple days later, when one of the staff arrived with a clipboard to gouge out the sort of specifics that the tests couldn’t provide. He knew the weak points and sore spots, knew where to probe for the terrors and doubts that I’d hidden from everyone.

  I could have told him to get lost, but I didn’t realize that. In my simpleminded fashion, I still imagined I was traveling under orders from God, and if God wanted this psychiatrist to invade my inner space, all I could do was submit. I submitted. He spent some two days tearing me apart to see what was festering inside.

  Meanwhile my father was driving down from Omaha to collect me, and he was scheduled to arrive late in the afternoon of the second day. Naturally he was paying for all this, which made him the client. It was understood that the psychiatrist would make his report and his recommendations to Bert, then it would be over.

  “But you’re not going to tell my father all this stuff, all this stuff we’ve been talking about.”

  The psychiatrist assured me that he wasn’t going to do that.

  Well, of course he did. That almost goes without saying, doesn’t it? He didn’t hold back anything. The doctor knows best, after all, and, as I say, Dad was the client, not me. I just sat there like a drooling moron, my ears crimson, while he pumped it all out.

  I can’t imagine what we talked about in the car going home. Maybe we didn’t talk at all. I thankfully have no memory at all of what happened next or of the weeks that followed.

  EIGHT

  Yes, that’s certainly the question. How could I reconcile the hour of sight that I’d been given at Gethsemani with what followed? I couldn’t. It simply didn’t make any sense. Here’s the way I was thinking about it: God wanted me to say yes to the monastic life, and then he kicked me out. It made no sense in those terms and still makes no sense in those terms. It took me thirty years of searching to find the terms in which it does make sense, and we’ll get to that in its proper place in the story.…

  No, I’d rather not give you any hints at this point. Well, I’ll give you this one hint. I’ve avoided the word vision to describe what happened, because what I experienced was not “a vision” in the sense of … This was not a Christian vision. I didn’t have a glimpse of heaven or of throngs of angels or of Jesus or Mary. There was simply nothing Christian about it. It was irrelevant to Christianity. Christ said, “My kingdom is not of this world,” and for two thousand years everybody knew that he meant exactly what he said. What I saw that day was not His kingdom. Not, not, not, not, not. What I saw that day was the world, and Christ never made anything clearer than the fact that he was not of this world, he belonged to the world above.

  At Menninger’s they’d given me a choice of therapists from their list of Menninger-trained psychoanalysts all over the country, and I chose one in Chicago, because I had friends there—Jerry Long and Bob Cahill, who, like me, had given up on the Writers’ Institute and were now at Loyola. I’d missed a semester by going to Gethsemani, and I decided to try to make up as much as I could at summer school, so, after a few weeks in Omaha, I headed to Chicago to find an apartment.

  By this time I’d achieved some psychological distance from the ordeal. I’d had to stand off from the religious life, for safety’s sake, because I no longer knew where I stood with God. It no longer made sense to invest too much of myself in His cause. Now, in order to rebuild my shattered self-esteem, I had to invest myself in something else, which was writing. I’d failed as a saint, but—

  Yes, that’s a good point. I said a few minutes ago that I’d imagined becoming a saint was simply a matter of choice, something you could either choose to do or not, because if you loved God, God had to love you back. This had proved to be not the case. But writing was different—presumably. Unlike becoming a saint, becoming a writer is something that’s entirely in your hands. If you have the talent and the determination, you can do it. You don’t need to be loved, you don’t need to take a Rorschach test, you don’t need anyone’s permission. So this was how I planned to rebuild my self-esteem. Once again, I don’t mean I figured this all out consciously. I mean that I had by now ceased to think of my future exclusively in terms of sanctity and had instead begun to think of it in terms of writing, and this is why.

  Oh, you don’t have to remind me, I’m not going to neglect that. I was supposed to be in Chicago because a certain psychoanalyst was there. This was Dr. Zirpoli—Robert, if my memory is correct. My relationship to him was false from the start. I couldn’t have known it, but I’m surprised he didn’t—or perhaps he did and considered it simply as a clinical problem to be solved. With the possible exception of something like behavior modification (which is more a matter of retraining than of therapy in the classical sense), psychotherapy is useless for someone who thinks he’s not in need of it. If I’d been honest, I would have said, “Look, Dr. Zirpoli, this is all a waste of time. There’s nothing wrong with me, so it’s stupid for me to sit here with you hour after hour, week after week.” Now that I think about it, the chances are good that I actually did say something like this to him. Doubtless he replied by asking me why I didn’t just walk out if I felt this way. See if you can guess how I would have answered him.…

  No? I think you could if you tried.

  I would have answered him this way: “The reason I don’t walk out is that my spiritual director thought this is what I should do. I don’t necessarily agree with his judgment, but it’s not my place to gainsay it.” This is what Dr. Zirpoli would have called (quite correctly) a rationalization. I couldn’t confront the fact that I didn’t have the self-assurance to walk out, so I blamed it on God—indirectly, through Father Louis.

  Zirpoli was a fairly strict adherent to the Freudian tradition. I mean he was totally nondirective and nonreactive. For example, if I had told him (as I probably did) that my father thought I was a queer, he would simply have sat there, or he might have said, “Oh yes?” It was up to me to figure out where to go from there. He wasn’t going to ask, for example, if I’d ever had any feelings of sexual attraction to a person of my own gender. I would’ve taken that as a sign that the presence or absence of such feelings had some bearing on the matter, and that wouldn’t do.

  The psychoanalyst isn’t there to provide reassurance. He’s there to provide a mirror in which you can see yourself. And at this point what I saw in the mirror had little relation to the image that was actually there. I was like an emaciated anorexic who looks in the mirror and sees someone who is fat, fat, fat, fat, fat.

  What was wrong with me was not my sexual orientation. What was wrong with me was that I was so profoundly insecure that I needed someone else to tell me what my sexual orientation was. I had no inner assurance on the subject of my own identity. But of course I didn’t see this at all. When I left his office after a session like this, I would be thinking: “Oh my God, maybe I am a queer.”

  After a
year of this, I was living in a state of perpetual anxiety and inner tumult, which I imagine is par for the psychoanalytic course. When it comes to psychoanalysis, a year is just scratching the surface.

  Meanwhile I fell in love, and this presented a crisis on several levels. In those days, for an earnest young man like me, to fall in love was to get married, and to get married would be to say good-bye to any possible return to the Trappist life. Perhaps even more distressing, to get married would be to adopt a life-style that, for a fundamentalist Roman Catholic, is spiritually second-rate. I assure you it’s true. Heavens, read St. Paul! Marriage is something you do if you must, something you do if you can’t manage without that filthy stuff called sex. Better to marry, Paul says, than to burn. Nowadays Catholics downplay this message, but it’s there, loud and clear: Virgins occupy a distinctly higher spiritual plane than married folks.…

  What was wrong with me was not my sexual orientation. What was wrong with me was that I was so profoundly insecure that I needed someone else to tell me what my sexual orientation was.

  Yes, this seems to contradict what I was saying a minute ago, that I was no longer investing myself so totally in the cause of God. But in fact there’s no contradiction here; if I’d still been investing myself totally in the cause of God, I wouldn’t have allowed myself to fall in love at all. But once I’d fallen in love, I immediately began to question what I was doing. As I say, I simply didn’t know what I was about, who I was, or what I wanted.

  In addition to these reservations, there was this: Would I, as a married man, be able to pursue a career as a writer? I remember asking the poet Paul Carroll what he thought about this. He was clearly doubtful but wasn’t comfortable giving me advice about such a thing. I asked a painter friend—himself married. He said, “If you don’t marry Katherine, you’ll always regret it.” Believe it or not, I clung fervently to this advice. I gave this person’s opinion far more weight than my own inclinations, because I wasn’t sure I could trust them.