Spiritual Quest Falls Short but Still Enlightens

A self-described balding, out-of-shape former CBS producer--now a freelance writer--drives up to a cabin on top of a mountain in upper New York state. It’s a mess: Surrounded by rotten wagon wheels, piles of firewood, a scum-topped plastic swimming pool, the cabin itself has ancient shag carpeting, plastic ceiling beams and a basement littered with mouse bodies. But Jon Katz is about to turn 50. Unnerved by the idea of “dying in New Jersey” where he lives with his wife and daughter, Katz longs for change, both in location and of heart.

When Katz was about to enter high school, he wrote a letter to Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, and, though Katz was Jewish, he might have “ended up in the monastery with him” had Merton replied. He didn’t. Katz went on to marry, work as a journalist, raise a child. Still a loyal reader of Merton, who died in 1968, Katz wants something of what Merton found when he was about the same age: solitude, a truer self, a hermitage. He hopes to renew “spirituality and idealism” in the “details of daily life.” The cabin and Merton’s guidance may provide a way.

With his two Labradors, a laptop, a stack of Merton’s books and the blessing of his wife and daughter, he moves in, planning to try it for the month of July. He battles summer heat, black flies, mice and, when going online, discovers he’s on a four-way party line. Nirvana it is not, but Merton’s hermitage at Gethsemani monastery in Kentucky wasn’t either. It was cold, bug-ridden and without electricity at first. Merton suffered from dermatitis, a displaced disk and insomnia.

Katz hangs in. In the nearby community, he finds generous people who offer good advice on men and mice. (Stan, a “huge man in overalls,” offers his cat named Claw.) Katz roams the woods with his dogs, gets up early to write and avoid the heat, disciplines himself to make only two e-mail checks per day. At the end of the month, he decides to buy the place (against his wife’s wishes and sometimes his better judgment), and to get down to serious renovation. Here, Katz’s comic ability shines. A new well must be dug, and the legendary Clarence arrives armed with a large wooden dowsing stick. This he hands to Katz with a laconic, “I have the feeling you’ve got the gift.” The drilling attracts a crowd (Clarence has never failed) complete with Katz’s real estate agent, two neighbors and a Jehovah’s Witness who hands out tracts. Katz clears out the previous owner’s knickknacks and highball glasses, gardens and learns to flip dead mice out of traps with a smooth flick of his wrist. He also learns about solitude, how it contains both dread and hope. And he continues to meditate on Merton.

“I was working to build new rituals and habits. Fending for myself, learning to be alone, embracing the discipline of solitude, were things I needed to establish at the outset. Loneliness, even voluntary as mine, was something I had to accept, not run from.”

Katz is very good at keeping a close eye on the human Merton, not the deified one. He reminds us that Merton battled his vocation, depression and illness much more than is evident from his early published works. He suggests that Merton’s decision to remain a monk rather than leave the monastery for a woman he loved may have been made out of fear of change as well as out of commitment.

But there is more to Merton, of course. Merton struggled with faith and ached for God for most of his life. These mysteries, his candor about them and his commitment to see them through are what gave Merton’s life its gravity and grandeur, possibly its tragedy. Katz wants us to believe that his “mundane” and “unheroic” life can share in something of what Merton had, but he doesn’t reveal enough of his own struggles, his own aches, his own tragedies, his own “spirituality.” He’s got a long marriage, a devotion to raising his daughter; he refers to his analysis as a spiritual journey, but he doesn’t delve deeply enough for us to understand the comparison to Merton. We are left with a promise unfulfilled. Perhaps this is the troubling distance between Merton and Katz, between a hard-won faith in the 1950s and a well-intentioned spirituality in the 1990s.

“On the mountain, I often fantasized about yakking with Merton,” he writes, “talking to him about the middle options, a life between his isolated existence and my overcrowded one.”

By the end of the book, Katz is more comfortable with his own life, complete with daughter, wife, work, the Internet, desire to watch old movies on cable and the need for retreat. It is a life with greater peace, cleaner water and more generosity than before. Certainly Thomas Merton would have smiled on this.

Nora Gallagher is the author of “Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith.”