Dove Letters: A Monk In The World

Dear lovedove,

Greetings from the Kansas City international Airport Quiet Room. It’s just me in here and a man who is wearing his hat over his eyes, sleeping, and a woman who I am assuming is playing Candy Crush with the noise slightly on (everyone has their own definition of “quiet”).

My AirPods are in, on “noise cancellation”, and today I am thinking about the fluctuations between life as a performer and what I can only call my strange magnetic pull to monastic life, i.e. meditating in a quiet room at an airport after playing a concert to 10,000 people in Kansas City last night.

Mom, Dad, Cyndi, and me after the show last night <3

I used to say that at any given moment there is about a 5-7% chance this will all end with me becoming a monk. The number fluctuates, depending on my mood or whatever external factors are affecting my life at the moment. Right now it’s lower, probably 2-3%. It’s been as high as 30%. I’ll explain.

The monastic life is not actually altogether different from the life of a musician who tours and performs and makes albums. The musician on the road has no home. Few possessions. The monk at the monestary has no possessions. A rigid schedule of work and prayer. The musician has an airtight schedule of concerts and writing and creating. Both are unlike many other vocations in this world. Perhaps on completely different ends of the spectrum, but still I see a commonality between the two. The biggest convergence in the middle of the monk / rock star venn diagram is that they are both EXTREME.

Mike Garson, one of my great friends, who was David Bowie’s piano player and longest standing musician in his band, told me that before Bowie became Bowie, he went to join a monastery, but his teacher there told him that his work was “in the world”. Thank God he listened!

I think many of us are called to be “monks in the world”. And by that I mean—we are called to be peaceful presences that bring love and light to spaces outside of the cloister walls. We devote much of our time to internal exploration and healing in order to understand ourselves more and be a deeper compassionate presence on this planet.

I do seriously still get tempted to fuck off and become a monk, but I do feel like my calling is to be of service on stage and as an artist. That doesn’t mean I haven’t flirted with the idea of monastic life. One of my favorite pastimes is to attend silent retreats at monasteries.

I first found out about a monastery where you can stay and have a silent weekend when I was still living in Nashville, back in 2019. It’s called the Abbey Of Gethsemene and it’s about a two hours drive from Nashville, up in Kentucky. Yes, on a beautiful green hill in Kentucky there is a 175-year-old monastery with a bunch of (mostly) old Catholic monks in white robes.

I was completely unprepared for my first trip there. I was walking baby steps when it came to spirituality and I don’t think I had ever spent that much time alone with myself ever, without a phone, without distractions. The retreat is self guided, meaning I was free to do whatever I wanted. The monks have multiple services a day, I attended some and attempted to chant the psalms with them. I walked around their extensive garden and trails. But mostly, I realized that, wow, it is really difficult to be quiet and alone with myself.

The question I was left with in my heart when I left that first time was do I even like hanging out with myself?

There was a monk who lived at this Abbey in the 20th century named Thomas Merton. I didn’t know who he was before I visited the abbey, but now he is one of my most trusted and truest North Stars for what it means to be a human on this earth.

Since that first trip I have devoured his writings, his most famous being his autobiography “The Seven Storey Mountain”, his writings on the intersection between Zen and Christian Mysticism, and my most favorite, his book of essays that I come back to ALL the time, “New Seeds of Contemplation”.

Last year, I returned to the Abbey of Gethsemene for the 4th time. This time I stayed for a week. This time I felt a little more comfortable in my skin, although I won’t lie, it is always jarring going from our modern world to one that is so simple, so slow. But after a few hours of an attack of the ego that can only be described as the sensation of one of those medieval balls on a chain with spikes hitting the side of your head telling you to get the fuck out, I usually calm down. I drink tea. I chant with the monks. I read.

In the library at the monastery there is a bookshelf that has all of Thomas Merton’s books. I am familiar with most of them at this point, but this time I saw something I had never seen. It wasn’t a bound book, it looked like some monk had seemingly printed out the pages and put two large plastic clips on it as its binding. It just said on the front “Thomas Merton - Eighteen Poems”. I opened it up, and there was a little note explaining that these poems were written by Thomas Merton in 1966. He entrusted them to a friend, requesting that they be published after he died. Little did he know he would only die 2 years later. Only 200 copies were ever printed, hence the scrappily printed solo copy in the library.

There was a little handwritten note inside the shabby copy to “not take this out of the library as it was painstakingly put together by one of the monks.”

What I found when I opened this book shocked me. Tears filled my eyes. These poems were not just typical monk poems. They were LOVE POEMS.

Thomas Merton, an ordained priest, celibate mystic, had a surgery and fell in love with the nurse who took care of him. These were the secret poems he wrote about her and that experience. Somehow in all my Merton research I had never heard this!

I devoured these poems like they had special healing powers in them. Maybe they do. It just completely exploded my mind to read what it sounds like when a person like Thomas Merton falls in love. It’s like a rom-com meets Rumi meets Adele. It’s deep, it’s forbidden, it’s universal.

I didn’t take the book out of the library, but every night before I went to bed, I hid it behind other books just in case someone else would have grabbed it, like I was Gollum in Lord of the Rings coveting “my precious”.

When I left the monastery that time, I figured I would be able to find a copy of these poems somewhere on eBay. Even if it was expensive, I was willing to fork it over. I searched. And searched. Nothing. Barely anything written on the internet about these poems. I PANICKED!

And I emailed the “Thomas Merton Archive”, asking if they have a PDF of these sacred poems. To my extreme delight, they replied in about 5 minutes with a copy attached.

So what did I do? I went home, printed out every page, cut and paste them on colorful construction paper and clipped them together just like the monk who did it before (it actually was pretty painstaking, I understand why they said so in the library copy…).

Now I must say, the person who sent me the copy asked me not to share it, but I do consider myself the Prometheus of Secret Monastic Writings, so I’m just going to share below one of my favorite poems from the book (forgive me, Father!)

…a monk falls in love and it makes us realize that all love comes from God, because if it’s not Love, it’s not God. Simple as that…

And on that note, I LOVE you.

See ya next week

Jake 🤍

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