In Praise of the Useless Life
A
Monk’s Memoir
By
Paul Quenon O.C.S.O.
Ave
Marie Press
ISBN:
13 978-1-59471-759-8
142
Pages
$15.95
Review
by Dennis Daly
After
living six decades in the Cistercian (Trappist) Monastery of
Gethsemani, Paul Quenon has written a quiet, self-effacing journal of
the heart, which periodically breaks out into syllabic dance and
grammatical song. This memoir purports to portray the life of an
ordinary man living in an unconventional community, a spiritual haven
that attracts both simple penitents and intellectual paragons.
However, a man, who keens at the death of trees, claims Emily
Dickinson as his soul sister, writes exquisite poetry, and engages in
a mysticism that he calls “the choreography of heaven” doesn’t
strike me as ordinary at all.
Throughout
this personal chronical Quenon weaves in scenes from the life of
Thomas Merton, as well as reiterating much of Merton’s
counter-cultural wisdom. It could not be otherwise. Early on Quenon
had read Merton’s autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, and
Merton’s stature as a modern-day monk had been one of the draws
that convinced him to enter the monastery. Once there Merton became
his novice master, adding layers of influence onto the young man.
Other novices schooled with Quenon during Merton’s stint as novice
master included a university valedictorian, a lawyer (presumably
there for repentance), a missionary back from New Guinea, a
psychologist, a later-in-life college president, a soon-to-be brain
surgeon and Ernesto Cardenal, who was to emerge as an influential
poet and controversial Sandinista revolutionary in Nicaragua.
Quenon
knows his audience and relates many inside baseball vignettes about
Merton. In one lightly humorous story the young Quenon appears at
Merton’s door to ask him, “What is the meaning of Zen?” In
answer Merton bops Quenon on the head with a book. When Quenon
persists in questioning this expert in eastern religion and
philosophy, Merton says, “There is a cherry tree outside the
window,” and leaves it at that.
Mother
Nature apparently took over Quenon’s education where Merton left
off. She provides him with daily, twenty-four hour classrooms, stirs
his enzymes, raises his energy, and generally nourishes his soul.
Going out into the weather is not only part of his life but also a
spirit-lifting ritual. “I am governed and made into something
larger than myself,” says Quenon. “One morning appears as a
Chinese painting,” he continues, “with cloaks of fog concealing
here, partly there, revealing hills, trees, and fields. Another morn
displays a brilliant sprawl of clarity, the color too good to be
true, unbearably perfect, until the sun heightens and the sky
blanches in the midday heat.”
One
of the chapter sections in Quenon’s book he entitles Eminent Trees
I Have Known. Here he voices the affecting kinship he felt upon the
demise of two linden trees, killed in order to make room for a new
infirmary. He studies his own reaction objectively. “I watched from
a distance as they were plowed over with a bulldozer, and the sight
provoked my voice to a high, soft pitch,” he says. “Such feelings
of kinship were a surprise to me; I had never made that sound before,
yet it seemed the only decent thing to do at the moment.”
Quenon,
not only sleeps under the stars most nights, but has molded his
meditational life around locations with expansive views and open to
the weather. Among these sites is the porch of Merton’s old
hermitage, about a mile into the woods behind the abbey. Quenon is
the caretaker of the hermitage and has escorted many renowned
visitors there, including Nobel Prize laureates Seamus Heaney and
Czeslaw Milosz. He often sits in a chair with a brass plate attached
to the top that says, “Bench of Dreams.” It was affixed there by
a man who had been assistant secretary general of the United Nations
for forty years.
Monks
have built-in models for their style of life. I’m thinking of the
desert fathers, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, and St.
Therese of Lisieux. Although familiar with the aforementioned, Quenon
seems to prefer the poet Emily Dickinson as an exemplar of Trappist
life and thought. He quotes many of her poetic lines including these,
Growth
of Man—like Growth of Nature,
Gravitates
within.
Atmosphere,
and sun endorse it—
But
it stir—alone.
Each
its difficult Ideal
Must
achieve—Itself—
Through
the solitary prowess
Of
a silent life.
My
favorite chapter in Quenon’s memoir he entitles Battle of Wits with
a Mockingbird. It’s pretty funny. As the monk tries to sleep
outside on the porch of the monastery’s lumber shed, a mockingbird
begins an unforgettable aria. At first Quenon tries to communicate
with the bird like Native Americans were once wont to do, making an
oracle out of the creature. Then he begins to yell at the bird. But
the bird believes this is a show of positive enthusiasm. Finally,
dead tired, the monk begins flapping his blanket, mimicking a bigger
bird. This works—for a while. But the next night the bird is back,
having figured out the blanket trick. And this epic battle goes on
night after night with Quenon using multiple stratagems like setting
up a plastic owl decoy to scare the bird or throwing water into the
trees. Yet none of these techniques work. Each defeat of monk by
mockingbird Quenon memorializes with a haiku, such as,
I
wish talent star
with
night variety shows
would
go off the air.
And
this one,
Harasses
the neighborhood
—Damn
sociopath!
Finally
after moving to a new sleeping place the monk planned and carried out
a sneak attack, violently shaking the bird’s tree. This
successfully startled the bird and he absented himself from the
vicinity. Now, however, Quenon exhibits all the telltale signs of
remorse. He clearly misses the clever show-off, and says so.
Quenon’s
literary window into the everyday life of Trappist monks is anything
but useless. It frames the monastery, and, by extension, humanity as
a vital buzzing hive of meaningful encounters, with its hooded
denizens conjuring up perpetual moments of unique existence and
creative imagination. Beware of this book if you’ve lost your sense
of childish play, if you live a life without song or dance, or if you
feel silly communing with trees. It could change you.
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