Books in Brief: The Hermitage Journals

The Hermitage Journals, by John Howard Griffin (Andrews & McMeel, 231 pp., $15). John Howard Griffin, author of the disturbing Black like Me, was a converted Catholic who was entrusted with writing the biography of Thomas Merton. Griffin, who died in 1980, never completed the project, but we now have, in this volume, the journal he kept of his 18 visits to the Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, to be followed in the near future by Michael Mott’s own, authorized biography. The Hermitage Journals is one of the most sensitive books I have had the pleasure to read in the past five years—a congeries of incisive meditations on the spiritual life, on politics, on God, that blatantly contradicts the image we wish to keep of arch-conservative Texans. There is no bigotry, no jingoism, no braggadocio in this “last testament” by Griffin. The journals are a subdued, if firm, exposure of prejudice and fanaticism. They poke fun at our fossilized view of religion and at our callousness toward the weak and downtrodden, at unnatural practices of virtue and self-righteous stigmatization of vices; but they are fundamentally a rumination on the mystery of the Christ of silences. Far from the rush of time, in the quiet of the abbey, Griffin engages in an attempt to relive Merton’s experience of “total nakedness before God.” He immerses himself in solitude, letting the peaceful surroundings envelop him, doing what Merton had done before him every day: he washes, he chops wood, he cooks breakfast, he dusts, he prays: but there’s no difference between mopping the floor and elevating one’s thoughts to God. Actions are “rituals” which prove that God is in all things, in the simple works performed daily. The painful clash between body and soul, so typical of medieval asceticism, is resolved at Gethsemani Abbey by Griffin’s renewed faith in the goodness of creation.

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Nereo E. Condini

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The Hermitage Journals, by John Howard Griffin (Andrews & McMeel, 231 pp., $15). John Howard Griffin, author of the disturbing Black like Me, was a converted Catholic who was entrusted with writing the biography of Thomas Merton. Griffin, who died in 1980, never completed the project, but we now have, in this volume, the journal he kept of his 18 visits to the Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, to be followed in the near future by Michael Mott’s own, authorized biography. The Hermitage Journals is one of the most sensitive books I have had the pleasure to read in the past five years—a congeries of incisive meditations on the spiritual life, on politics, on God, that blatantly contradicts the image we wish to keep of arch-conservative Texans. There is no bigotry, no jingoism, no braggadocio in this “last testament” by Griffin. The journals are a subdued, if firm, exposure of prejudice and fanaticism. They poke fun at our fossilized view of religion and at our callousness toward the weak and downtrodden, at unnatural practices of virtue and self-righteous stigmatization of vices; but they are fundamentally a rumination on the mystery of the Christ of silences. Far from the rush of time, in the quiet of the abbey, Griffin engages in an attempt to relive Merton’s experience of “total nakedness before God.” He immerses himself in solitude, letting the peaceful surroundings envelop him, doing what Merton had done before him every day: he washes, he chops wood, he cooks breakfast, he dusts, he prays: but there’s no difference between mopping the floor and elevating one’s thoughts to God. Actions are “rituals” which prove that God is in all things, in the simple works performed daily. The painful clash between body and soul, so typical of medieval asceticism, is resolved at Gethsemani Abbey by Griffin’s renewed faith in the goodness of creation.