PART ONE

Solemn Profession

December, 1946 to December, 1947 This Journal started when I had been five years in the monastery. That meant that I was coming to the end of my term of simple vows and was making up my mind to take solemn vows and stay in the monastery for good.

When you enter a Cistercian monastery you spend some time as a postulant. After that you are a novice for two years, during which you hope to learn the rudiments of the Trappist life and discover whether or not you belong in the monastery. After that you make temporary simple vows for three years. These serve to prolong your probation. If, after these five years of probation, you want to leave, you are free to do so. If you stay, you make solemn perpetual vows. By these vows you consecrate your whole life to God in the monastery. After that you just forget about going back to the world.

By the grace of God it was easy for me to forget the world as soon as I left it. I never wanted to go back. However, I often wondered if I should not go to some other monastery. This was what is known as a "temptation." But at the time when I began writing this Journal I could not be quite sure whether it was a temptation or not. And I was a great nuisance to my spiritual directors on that account.

At that time I thought I was upset by the fact that DomFrederic, who was then Abbot, wanted me to write a lot of books. Perhaps I was less upset than I thought. But in any case, I did have to write a lot of books, some of which were terrible.

In December, 1946, I received word from a New York publisher that one of these books had been accepted. The book was called The Seven Storey Mountain and it was an autobiography. As things turned out, it became quite popular. I thought it would, but I did not like to admit it, because that might possibly be pride. And maybe it was.

(I remember when I was a novice, before I wrote the book, I went to confession and confessed, as a temptation, that I had thought of writing an autobiography, and the confessor found this extremely funny. He said: "Ha! Ha! Ha! When Chesterton wrote his autobiography he showed it to one of his friends and he was told that it didn't amount to much. Now if that happened to Chesterton, what would happen to you? ..." And, indeed, I have been told in set terms by some of the readers of the book that it does not amount to much. I do not say that I expected it to be a good book, I just say I expected it to be popular.)

All this time I was studying theology, and I was a cleric in minor Orders. To be exact, I had been ordained exorcist on the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels in 1946, and it seemed that I would not reach the priesthood for a hundred years.

So on the Feast of Saint Joseph — March 19, 1947 — I made my solemn vows.

I did not become a better monk after solemn vows than I had been before them, and I went on worrying about much the same things and striving to write a book called The Waters of Siloe in which I solemnly declare how monks are supposed to act if they want to be monks. I am beginning to realize how much of an impertinence this was. The reason why I wrote the book was that Dom Frederic wanted a history of the Order and of the monastery to be published when we celebrated the hundredth anniversary of our foundation. But I found myself involved in a discussion of monastic ideals. Perhaps, from my own point of view at least, this was useful. Thinking about monastic ideals isnot the same as living up to them, but at any rate such thinking has an important place in a monk's life, because you cannot begin to do anything unless you have some idea what you are trying to do.

There is nothing to prevent a monk from praying even while he writes a book. This discovery did not come to me until I finally resigned myself to being a writer, and found out that the job had one big compensation: it brought me solitude. In 1946 and 1947 I did not have a room to myself to write in, and so it did not occur to me to pray while I was writing. The room where I worked was shared by another monk with another typewriters canonist, working on some involved problem of law. He was, in fact, my professor of theology and later became my confessor. He was also one of the censors whose penance was to read the pages that flowed with such regularity from my typewriter in those innocent days.

Among other things that happened during this year, I had to serve as the secretary of the Abbot General of the Order when he came to Gethsemani to make an official Visitation. Then in July some monks were sent to Utah to make a foundation. During the year I had the job of assistant cantor, which sounds like much more than it is, and during the summer I read books aloud in the dining-room of the guest house to the visitors who came on weekend retreats to the monastery.

December 10 ADVENT [1946]

It is five years since I came to the monastery. It is the same kind of day, overcast. But now it is raining. I wish I knew how to begin to be grateful to God and to Our Lady for bringing me here.

There was a long interval after afternoon work. It was good to be in the big quiet church. The church is dark, these winter afternoons.

December 13 SAINT LUCY

The years since I entered Gethsemani have gone by like five weeks. It was a fine bright day, not very cold, with little clouds very high up in a clear sky. Yesterday, although it is Advent and we are not supposed to receive any letters at all, Dom Frederic* gave me a letter from Naomi Burton of Curtis Brown, Ltd. I had sent her the manuscript of The Seven Storey Mountain. Her letter about it was very good and she is quite sure it will find a publisher. Anyway, my idea — and hers also — is to turn it over to Robert Giroux at Harcourt, Brace.

At work — writing — I am doing a little better. I mean, I am less tied up in it, more peaceful and more detached. Taking one thing at a time and going over it slowly and patiently (if I can ever be said to do anything slowly and patiently) and forgetting about the other jobs that have to take their turn. For instance, Jay Laughlin wants two anthologies for New Directions press. I wonder if I will ever be able to do them. If God wills. Meanwhile, for myself, I have only one desire and that is the desire for solitude — to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of His Face.

December 14 SATURDAY

This afternoon we were working on the road from the old horsebarn to the lower bottom, filling in a deep gully that had washed out all along the road, down to the bottom of the hill. It was another bright, warm day. The new brick horsebarn, under the water tower, where the vineyard used to be, is almost finished. They are clearing ground already for the new garden house. There were some fat turkeys in the pen. Father Joel has already started to put up the crib, in the...