The Hermitage Journals

by

Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

Perhaps one of the deepest struggles humans face is the conflict between the yearning to be with others—in their physical company, in close intimate relations, and in the same spaces with them, even though they might be in another room—and the deep desire for solitude. How many of us can begin our days in complete silence—no TV news or weather, no morning drive radio, no conversation with our partners—and listen and learn deeply from the present stillness and the sounds that accompany it? In our culture, we’re seldom encouraged to experience such solitude. Not too long ago a commercial billboard for a cell phone company advertised the silliness of silence. Yet, solitude and silence is where we re-form ourselves; it’s the place and time that we reach deep into our souls or psyches to discover our organic relation to the world, to discover our wholeness that has been broken by the world. Yet, for most of us solitude is hard to come by. We do lead busy lives, after all—running to work, meeting the demands of family, meeting the demands of friends and lovers, walking and caring for our pets. Where would we find time for solitude? And what would we do after we experienced it and had to come back to our fast-paced lives? How would we integrate it?

Many novelists have asked this question, most notably Hermann Hesse in his Narcissus and Goldmund. Narcissus is an ascetic monk whose life of the mind and his ability to live a life of spiritual solitude impresses the young Goldmund. Although Goldmund strives to be like Narcissus, he is too attracted to the pleasures of the world outside the monastery walls. Hesse presents the paths as antithetical though parallel. Each man travels a different path, though each finds himself and discovers his spiritual vocation. Yet, the struggle between flesh and spirit, solitude and activity, is central to this marvelous novel.

It is of course instructive that Hesse sets his novel in a monastery, for monks are the ones in our Western culture who are usually perceived as those who have time and space to find solitude. Indeed, these men, we imagine, go to the monastery seeking solitude. Our culture often condemns this kind of life, not only because our culture abhors silence but also because our culture disapproves of inactivity. Our culture confuses the activity of prayer or writing or reading or translating—and the solitude necessary for such tasks—as inactivity and a waste of time. However, one of the most eloquent books ever published about the search for solitude and the attempt to balance the solitary life with the active life came from the pen of a married man with four children who lived many moments of solitude throughout his life.

In 1961, John Howard Griffin shocked the world with his account of racism in the Deep South. Although Griffin’s Black Like Me recorded his own experience of racism, it was a bit unusual. In 1959, Griffin, a white man, took several skin pigmentation treatments to turn his skin black. He then traveled through Texas and the Deep South, recording the abuses and indignities that whites heaped upon blacks. The experiences about which he wrote in his book provided ample evidence that Griffin cared deeply about social justice and that changes in the social fabric of America could come only through active work toward justice.

Not long after his book was published, Griffin met Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk whose life seemed a perfect combination of the active and the contemplative. Merton lived as a hermit in Gethsemani Abbey, a Trappist monastery near Louisville, Kentucky. After Merton’s untimely death in 1968—he was accidentally electrocuted in Bangkok during a visit to discuss the Vietnam War, which he opposed, and interreligious dialogue—the Brothers asked Griffin to write Merton’s biography.

Griffin’s The Hermitage Journals: A Diary Kept While Working on the Biography of Thomas Merton is a marvelous account of his life from 1969 to 1972, when he lived in Merton’s hermitage at Gethsemani, poring over Merton’s writings and living the life of solitude and contemplation that Merton had lived there. Like Merton, he journeyed outside the walls of the Abbey—often to speak out against social injustice—but unlike Merton, he often traveled back to Fort Worth to visit his wife and children. Yet, these journals are beautiful and elegant reminders of the lessons that solitude teaches. As he discovers on his initial trip to the hermitage: “Here one was alone without the slightest sense of loneliness, and the longer it lasted the more profound grew the felicity, the sense of freedom, the faith, the loving.” In addition, he wonders “how could one find such solitude in the world for a sufficiently long period to learn what it had to teach, and how many of us spend our entire lives without ever experiencing it, or even a hint of it. Solitude in this sense differs vastly from merely being alone or passing through the hours. The creator and all creation are one’s constant companions, day and night, in all one’s occupations.”

In every journal entry, Griffin grows more easy and comfortable with his solitude. He begins almost all of his entries with a reflection on the natural world around him. Up between 3:15 and 5:00 every morning (not unusual in a monastery, where the liturgical offices of prayer begin then), he listens to the profound silence, watches the animals stirring and eating, and warms himself by the crackling of his wood fire. In November 1970, Griffin beautifully describes the meaning of solitude as he has come to learn it. “And it is true that in solitude, the whole idea of virtues and vices simply fades. You are here, open, you live with the reality of days and nights and heats and colds and forests and animals . . . and it is just enough to ‘be’. It doesn’t matter if you are clothed or unclothed, well clothed or ill clothed, uttering words or silent. You cannot live it without loving . . . The very nature of your solitude involves you in union with the prayers of the wind in the trees, the movement of the stars, the feeding of the birds in the fields, the building of anthills. You witness the creator and attend to him in all his creation.”

There is no more perfect description of the joys of solitude, and there is no better book than Griffin’s to dip into the joys of the contemplative spirit.


Henry Carrigan dreamed of being a rock ‘n roll star with a life of coast-to-coast tours and wild parties with Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell among others. But books intervened, and instead he went to Emory University to major in Religion and Literature. Later, teaching humanities in college, he took up writing about books—this time to avoid reading students’ papers. Henry soon became Library Journal's religion columnist, then religion book editor for Publishers Weekly. While working as editor-in-chief for Northwestern University Press and editing classic books for Paraclete Press, he still continues to write for LJ and PW, as well as the Washington Post Book World, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Charlotte Observer, ForeWord magazine—and now, BiblioBuffet. And he still enjoys playing his guitar. Henry can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it