The Unanswered Question in Thomas Merton's “Fire Watch”

Abstract

Many readers have regarded the Fire Watch epilogue to Thomas Merton's published journal The Sign of Jonas (1953) as among the most powerful and eloquent of his writings. Merton's biographer, Michael Mort, describes the Fire Watch narrative as almost a prose poem and goes on to say that, in part because of its being dated on Independence Day, 4 July 1952, the piece exhibits a for, and loyalty to, a place (267). (1) Mott's comment is apt, particularly in light of the vow of stability that bound Merton for life to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. The Fire Watch, which grew out of Merton's temporary duty as a night watchman charged with spotting any incipient signs of fire in the monastery, documents his revisiting of places that had marked the stages of his formation as a Trappist monk. In walking through the monastery, which had been erected by French Trappists in the nineteenth century, Merton mentally excavated both the Abbey's past and his own. The evocative qualities of the Fire Watch that have attracted the praise of readers over the years derive in part from the skillful interweaving of a rich symbolic typology and the vivid depiction of a spiritual journey, a journey that is keyed to an unanswered question. The symbolic typology, which is sustained throughout the Fire Watch, involves an antithetical juxtaposition of day and night, each with its cumulative secondary associations. With the night Merton associates the eternal abyss, the fecund darkness of the soul, and the blissful silence and solitude that permit an emerging sense of contact with the transcendent. The day he associates with the intellect and reason, language and speech, the desire for clarity, and the articulation of meaning. The antithetical motifs of light and darkness are nourished, from a narrative point of view, by the concrete particulars of Merton's progress as watchman and by the injection of wit and paradox Paradox appears, for example, in the observation that night and darkness bring a semblance of order before all things disappear (349), a reversal of the conventional perception of day and night. The daytime, filled with external movement and declared purposes, is granted only a shallow kind of order alongside the immensity of the night, which allows the mind, now able to set aside its tasks, to focus on ultimate realities. Adopting the biblical persona of Jonas or Jonah, Merton conceives of his relationship to his community as similar to that of Jonas inside the whale. In the biblical account the whale serves as an instrument sent by God to bring Jonas to his senses and to his divinely appointed destiny. Similarly, Merton hopes that his participation in his monastic community, which he describes as a holy monster (349), will allow him to reach his divinely appointed destiny, however obscure that destiny might at times appear. As he goes through his rounds as firewatcher, Melton is reminded both of the depth of his own vocation and of his need to achieve a more individual encounter with God, something that seems more and more pressing as he moves through the darkness in which most of his fellow monks are either asleep or trying to sleep in the summer heat. His growing detachment from the community-driven work of the day appears humorously as he visits the monks' kitchen where he notes that each of the walls has been painted a different color, a matter that had produced some minor controversy in the community. While claiming, as merely a watchman, to have no opinion about the matter, Merton clearly found the sight startling, referring to it as dizzy and new. Setting the matter into perspective, though, he winds up his visit to the kitchen with a look at a bit of Scripture painted on one of the walls close to the ceiling: Little children, love one another! (351). Although in his fire watch Merton gradually distances himself from his community in order to experience himself spiritually in an individual sense, he retains a fundamental respect for the community's role in his life, referring to that community at one point as a religious city (359). …