Perhaps the dormitory of the choir monks is the longest room in Kentucky. Long lines of cubicles with thin partitions a little over six feet high, shirts and robes and scapulars hang over the partitions trying to dry in the night air. Extra cells have been jammed along the walls between the windows. In each one lies a monk on a straw mattress. One pale bulb burns in the middle of the room. The ends are shrouded in shadows. I make my way softly past cell after cell. I know which cells have snorers in them. [Ibid. at page 116]
A modern structure, the shelter has heat sensors and smoke detectors and a sprinkler system. Fire is less of a concern, but some of the residents have chronic health issues and must be monitored constantly and so I regularly patrol the corridors. Night here is not a time of rest but an anxious troubling pause, when residents sometimes raid the kitchen for a peanut-butter sandwich or a scoop of cottage cheese. Night is when the world is briefly on hold.
For Merton, night is freighted with deep spiritual significance. The Fire Watch has been described as a prose poem and it concludes ecstatically, as Brother Louis scales the stairs of the abbey tower and looks out at the nighttime world:
Mists of damp heat rise up out of the fields around the sleeping abbey. The whole valley is flooded with moonlight and I can count the southern hills beyond the watertank, and almost number the trees of the forest to the north. Now the huge chorus of living beings rises up out of the world beneath my feet: life singing in the water-courses, throbbing in the creeks and the fields and the trees, choirs of millions and millions of jumping and flying and creeping things. And far above me the cool sky opens upon the frozen distance of the stars. [Ibid. at pages 117-118]
The shelter offers no such release. Outside the night is quiet. No chorus of crickets but the distant sound of traffic, and moonlight strikes hard off broken concrete where businesses once stood. Nonetheless it is a place of sanctuary, and not only for those who reside here.
The shelter kitchen provides meals for indigent folks in the neighborhood. Toward the end of the month when government checks have been spent and food stamps exhausted, the dining room overflows at mealtimes. A boldly printed sign on the kitchen door reads: "No Seconds." It is routinely ignored.
Keenly aware that dozens of souls are in our charge, we hold fire drills and tornado drills, but some tragedies no one can adequately prepare for. Jake was an unemployed veteran, a big man with a barrel chest and a stormy face. When the Great Recession hit in 2008, Jake lost his job and his home and all sense of direction.
For men like Jake the plight of homeless veterans is not a statistical abstraction. His was a world of abridged possibilities and stifled dreams, and his circumstances made Jake very angry. He seemed always on the verge of exploding and I admired him for his determination to hold his fury in check. A victim of economic violence, Jake was not a man to passively accept victimhood.
In this age of appalling injustice and soaring inequality, Merton's words in a later essay, The Plague of Albert Camus: A Commentary and Introduction, remain piercingly condign. The third paragraph of what I believe to be his most important composition reads in part:
Man's drive to destroy, to kill, or simply to dominate and to oppress comes from the metaphysical void he experiences when he finds himself a stranger in his own universe. He seeks to make that universe familiar to himself by using it for his own ends, but his own ends are capricious and ambivalent. They may be life-affirming, they may be expressions of comprehension and of love, or they may be life-denying, armored in legalism and false theology, or perhaps even speaking the naked language of brute power. [Merton, Thomas, The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, New York, New Directions Books, 1981, pages 181-182]
Jake was turning the corner. His proudest possession was a ninety-day pin from Alcoholics Anonymous and he sensed his long travail was nearing its end. Having recovered himself, Jake encouraged others to join him at AA meetings. But his outrage--an appropriate response to a society that sent him off to war and exalted his heroism and later shunned him in his time of need--still lurked beneath an increasingly placid exterior, and he remained fiercely aware of his status as a discarded pawn in someone else's power game.
Victory at the shelter happens when a resident departs for a place of his own, a steady job and a shot a future happiness. Defeats happen with greater frequency. To work at a homeless shelter is to learn how to listen. Residents need an uncritical ear. A common theme running through their recitations is the astonishing speed with which things can fall apart, and how close each of us is to the anonymity of the breadline and the debasement of the gutter. In his essay on Camus's The Plague, Merton writes:
Plague here represents all the forms of evil which break in upon human existence and curtail the freedom of man by destroying the basic assumptions upon which he builds his plans for future action. Thinking which does not adequately account for evil cannot be called realistic. Freedom that presupposes such unreal thinking is not free. Camus summons the Plague to bear witness to the fact that no systematic thinking can be fully realistic if it excludes the radical absurdity of an existence into which evil or irrationality can break without warning. [Ibid. at pages 190-191]
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