Removing Shoes

Gethsemani – This Trappist monastery in tiny Bardstown, Kentucky was made world-known because of the writer/monk Thomas Merton who wrote many forward-thinking spiritual books while cloistered here in the 1950’s and 60’s. My first visit here three years ago came about from a writer’s curiosity to see the place where a favorite writer had worked and lived, and was now buried – not to mention the promise of silence and 2,000 acres of walking trails for the contemplation of my own fledgling writer. “Retreatants,” as we weeklong guests are called, take a vow of silence for the week – that’s all. About half the retreatants are Catholic, the rest are something else or nothing at all or undecided.

This place draws me. I’m drawn to it. Just when I was thinking this will be my last year here – after all, it’s too far to travel, there are other ways to find a week of silence, etc. – I realize I must come here every year just at this time, the third week in October. Trees-full of birds greeted me when I got out of the car. Come every year, they said. Others must think the same, for there are so many familiar faces from last year – about 10 of the 30 retreatants I recognize from last year, this same week. I see license plates from all over the country, people who have driven more than my mere 600 miles.

There’s a reason I was drawn to read all of Thomas Merton’s books as a teenager, using babysitting money for each new purchase. But why? I’ve been told (by monks) that was very unusual, but my life has become very usual, nothing spectacular, nothing extraordinary. I always wanted to write as a child – then went to college, worked, got married, stayed home with children, and now wonder what to do with the rest of my life. Writing, in the bit of time I steal from the daily routine, holds little promise of the extraordinary . . .

Father Damien is our talking Guestmaster here at the monastery. He just got back from a three-month visit to Indonesia, the place where Merton ultimately died from a tragic accident in 1968. Fr. Damien is 77 years old, and he says he is not the same person he was five years ago – or five years before that. He struggled throughout his middle age to find what he was “meant to do” – though he knew since fourth grade that he wanted to be a priest and was at the time a successful pastor. “The clock was ticking in me every day,” he said, and it was in his mind that the clock was ticking: “What was I meant to do?” Strangely, he said, the clock stopped ticking when he drove up the Gethsemani driveway for a week of reflection about 20 years ago.

“So this is it – to make cheese the rest of my life?” Everyone laughed when he said that because even the monks, most of all the monks, make light of the daily, ordinary tasks of making cheese and fruitcakes to feed the masses. (Actually, they also say it’s the most radical, alternative lifestyle imaginable.) But it was true, he said, that he felt he had “arrived” – and it wasn’t glamorous as he thought his life’s work would be. He chose the name Damien as a young priest because he wanted to do great works, be a great missionary, be famous and renowned as the leper Saint from whom he chose his name. He said this with no face or voice of that former self – just a fact, as though saying he used to eat peanut butter sandwiches as a youth. He finally has the sense of being who he really is, he said – still a priest, but now a monk, and in a place where he grows and learns so much every day that he is “not the same person” he was five years ago. His days, he said, are like a kaleidoscope that is moved ever so slightly each day, so that the entire image is changed and a new perspective is always emerging from such small shifts – and it’s not over yet, he said.

While in Indonesia, he said he went into the mosques five times a day to pray as the Muslims pray – which must have seemed like a vacation because the Trappist monks pray/chant seven times a day beginning at 3:00 a.m. He entered the mosques wearing his cleric collar, and was asked only to remove his shoes as is the tradition. That kind of broadmindedness and inclusiveness – from both sides – is most likely why I was drawn to read Merton as a young adult. He talked about the profound respect implied in the small act of removing one’s shoes, and related something from the Bible about when Moses was at the burning bush and God told him to remove his shoes – “You’re on Holy ground now.”

I think of my decades-long Buddhist practice, and of how the shoes are always removed and left at the door of a meeting place; I think of my habitual tendency to remove my shoes when coming into my own house; of gladly discarding shoes the minute I see a beach before me; and of my curious preference for writing without shoes. Even when my feet are cold on the kitchen floor, I always write without shoes. Maybe that means something.

It’s an ordinary life for Fr. Damien, but one that he was meant to live – and he knows that – and that’s the kind of thing I take my shoes off to.