The other night as you are on your way to Compline you perhaps decide to go around outside the rear of the church because it is a wild night and worth sampling, what with a heavy rain and a splendid wind tearing down the last of the leaves. A perfect night for the dark end of the year, for All Saints and for All Souls. And as you come to the door and reach out to put your hand to the clasp, you note some light down by the juniper where Father Louis [Thomas Merton, --ed.] lies buried. You look again and there bright and clear, no murk, no mist, stands Brother Zachary (†), cowl blowing in the wind. He looks right at you, that Mona Lisa smile on his lips, and he bows to you. A whole minute maybe you are together and then as quick as that he is gone and there is nothing but the dark and the wind and the rain and you standing there about to open the door. And you go into Compline, only Compline is a bit different for you that night. Maybe next day you see someone, your confessor, the abbot, maybe that night already. And he will tell you what Father Louis told us when we were novices: nothing to fuss over. No great thing. Perfectly natural. Nothing to marvel at. Make nothing of it. Thank God for it. For it is like a good dream. Maybe your faith is weak and needs bolstering. Just make very sure you do not coax this sort of thing. No fetching up this kind of experience. Very dangerous. Very bad.

People used to come to me when I was in the South Pacific [New Guinea --ed.] and beg me almost with tears to help them. And what was I to help them with? What way? They wanted to see their dead. They did not think I saw the dead. They knew I did. For I was the holy man. I lived alone on a hill. I prayed. Out back there was the cemetery with the early missionaries. Which I visited every day. For they used to see their dead too, they said. In times past. But they don't any more. Why? Well, their lives are too distracted now. They can travel about, which they could never do before. There is radio and news and money and stores and strangers and lots of exciting things going on. And so they have lost what they had before. And they worry about it. Maybe their dead are angry. Maybe something is wrong. And they miss this so.

Primitive indeed. But right on, for all that. You know how western man differs from primitive man? You know how modern man differs from the man of the ages of faith? Western man, modern man, has lost contact with his depths. He is no longer in communion with himself. This leads to disease. And modern man is very sick with this disease.

One reason why monasteries exist now and before is to set up an environment where it is possible to be healthy, to be normal. It is really necessary to do this, for it is not easy to be healthy when everyone around you is sick. Not easy to be normal when all about you are mad.

So what a monastery does is to create a climate in which communion with the world of the spirit is easy and normal. Natural. A primitive village is like that. Celtic Ireland was like that. The Ages of Faith, so called, were like that. And we here aim to be like that too.

All the factors of monastic life help make the total picture, the habitat. So it is first of all a matter of high regard for Jesus Christ and the effort to make Him the center of everything. And then there is the matter of realism, of contact with nature, with work, with people. On a real level, not on a level of make believe, of pretense. Not by way of competition and aggression, but by way of love, of cooperation. In a setting of beauty. For beauty is elemental. Man cannot live without tenderness and care, of thoughtfulness, of composure. And most of all, I would guess, the beauty of quiet. The most precious commodity of all, that rare quality so long since banished from the haunts of men. For without quiet there is no pondering. Without pondering there is no contact with the deeps. And without contact with the deeps man perishes.

Men perish all around us. Day by day. Men are overwhelmed with darkness in the midst of a world of so much. And of so much good. And so many good people are thus overwhelmed. And whence the darkness? The darkness is from within. For when the deeps are ignored, when the unconscious is crushed, repressed, it backs up and then one day explodes. And so gets its revenge. For our deeps, you see, are not only good. And for sure they are good. But they are also like man himself. Also evil. And the good and the evil within must be faced in Jesus Christ. Otherwise things happen without our knowing why.

Whence comes the madness that marks so much of our times? The awful movements that sweep over the earth? The terrifying trends? The hideous gospels that are spread everywhere and work so much harm? Whence are they if not from our depths? Our own. Evil so easily and so blandly embraced, espoused, advocated, propagated. I spare you calling them by name. You know them all. And words are of no avail against these demons.

We laugh at the primitive Celts, the ignorant Irish. We smile at the weird way of primitives. But say this much for them, my wise brother, say this much: at least they deal with the powers within. Which is more than our world does. Our world denies we have anything within. And see the consequences of that folly.

How needy then to have monasteries. And real monasteries. Not just men's clubs. Not just places of competent work and estimable liturgy and adequate learning. And decent people. But monasteries in which the deeps are met in Jesus Christ, and good blessed, and evil cursed --lest the world perish.

This does not take supermen. Only human ones. Normal ones. Who know the rain, and feel the wind. Who know darkness and the silence of the night. Who can abide with quiet. And know the beauty of a simple way of living, without clamor and din, without noise and confusion, without constant distraction and unending input that so overwhelms a poor human.

Not that we need see the dead. We have our faith and faith is enough for us. Seeing the dead is but one aspect of our dealings with the inner realities. But it is only thus that faith can survive, for religion dies when there is no longer contact with the deeps within. It is good to be an introvert, for then it comes easy. It is good to have a strong relation to the woman within, for then the tension is there that is so creative. And it is good to know that nothing is as fitting as listening, nothing as rewarding as docility, nothing so commanding as obedience, for obedience curbs selfishness and assertion and arrogance and pride, that host of enemies that lay waste the spirit.

Today we think of the dead. Their brief moment is now over. They are now in eternity. Now we have our brief moment here. We came yesterday. Are here today. Will be gone tomorrow. Let that brief moment be spent in communion with the whole of life so that we will not have lived in vain.

The whimsical smile of Brother Zachary implies just that.(†)

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(†) Brother Zachary, known for his gentle smile, played the harp at the Gethsemani liturgy. He had died five years earlier.