When I finally got off in Bardstown, I was standing across road from a gas station. The street appeared to be empty, as if the town were asleep. But presently I saw a man in the gas station. l went over and asked where I could get someone to drive me to Gethsemani. So he put on his hat and started his car and we left town on a straight road through level country, full of empty fields. It was not the kind of landscape that belonged to Gethsemani, and I could not get my bearings until some low, jagged, wooded hills appeared ahead of us, to the left of the road, and we made a turn that took us into rolling, wooded land.

Then I saw that high familiar spire.

I rang the bell at the gate. It let fall a dull, unresonant note inside the empty court. My man got in his car and went away. Nobody came. I could hear somebody moving around inside the Gatehouse. I did not ring again. Presently, the window opened, and Brother Matthew looked out between the bars, with his clear eyes and greying beard.

“Hullo, Brother,” I said.

He recognized me, glanced at the suitcase and said: “This time have you come to stay?”

“Yes, Brother, if you’ll pray for me,” I said.

Brother nodded, and raised his hand to close the window.

“That’s what I’ve been doing,” he said, “praying for you.”

Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, p.371.

And here is what strikes me as the most phenomenal thing about her. She became a saint, not by running away from the middle class, not by abjuring and despising and cursing the middle class, or the environment in which she had grown up: on the contrary, she clung to it in so far as one could cling to such a thing and be a good Carmelite. She kept everything that was bourgeois about her and was still not incompatible with her vocation: her nostalgic affection for a funny villa called “Les Buissonnets,” her taste for utterly oversweet art, and for little candy angels and pastel saints playing with lambs so soft and fuzzy that they literally give people like me the creeps. She wrote a lot of poems which, no matter how admirable their sentiments, were certainly based on the most mediocre of popular models.

To her, it would have been incomprehensible that anyone should think these things were ugly or strange, and it never even occurred to her that she might be expected to give them up, or hate them, or curse them, or bury them under a pile of anathemas. And she not only became a saint, but the greatest saint there has been in the Church for three hundred years – even greater, in some respects, than the two tremendous reformers of her Order, St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Avila.

The Seven Storey Mountain, pp.354f.

Thomas Merton’s account of packing and leaving for the monastery reminds me of Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress, fleeing with “his fingers in his ears … crying Life! life! eternal life!”

Yay! It’s time to start working through Tumblr’s favourite book again: