I walk the grounds. I pray. I meditate. by Camden Chaffee

As one of the oldest Trappist monasteries in the United States, the Abbey of Gethsemani sits tucked away in the Kentucky hills, safely hidden from an apathetic modern world. When the writer and mystic Thomas Merton first came to the Abbey in the 1940s after completing graduate work in English at Columbia University, he was still searching for who he was and still sifting through the broken pieces of his past, still searching for God. Now, after making my pilgrimage, I park in the Abbey’s parking lot and get out of my car and embrace the beautiful July day, the sun shining warmly on my face. I feel the overwhelming peace that Merton certainly must have felt while walking the grounds. Like Merton, I too am on a search for who I am and where I belong, still examining my past trials and hurts, striving to find God in everything.

I’ve come to believe that, in order to live meaningful, fruitful lives, we must learn to accept the totality of the human experience - the pain, the brokenness, the hurts, the doubts - with the hope that one day, it will all have meaning and great purpose. And that God remains in all that we endure. Merton once wrote, “I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are”. As I have become overwhelmed and disturbed by insignificant troubles that have plagued me, I have failed to remember the God who lives in and around me, who resides in every experience, in all that happens to me - the beautiful and the awful moments, the moments filled with anxiety and discomfort. I have failed to remember the God who, through becoming incarnate, understands the fullness of what it means to live, and who enters into communion with us in every moment, in every experience.

At the Abbey, I stand in the parking lot, taken aback by the serenity that has engulfed me. I listen to the sound of birds singing, and the wind rushing through the leaves. I see two cardinals, reminding me of the dear loved ones I have lost.

I walk the grounds. I pray. I meditate. I visit Merton’s grave, near the Abbey’s church; I ask for his intercession. I stand on the ground where Merton once walked, thinking of God’s words to Moses on Mount Horeb.

Take off your shoes. Where you are standing is Holy ground.

The stillness of the afternoon absorbs my silent prayers, prayers that are not so much pleas for help and escape from my distresses, my uncertainties, my doubts, but ones that ask my

God to simply be present with me in the storm, so that I may not feel so alone. I notice the words carved above the entrance into the garden.

God Alone.

I am alive. Beautifully, painfully alive. I think of all those who aren’t.