Nothingness.

Merton, New Mexico, 1968

In May 1968, Christian mystic Thomas Merton undertook a pilgrimage to the American West. Fifty years later, filmmaker Jeremy Seifert and writer Fred Bahnson set out to follow Merton’s path, retracing the monk’s journey across the landscape. Amid stunning backdrops of ocean, redwood, and canyon, the film features the faces and voices of people Merton encountered ...

From III. Desert ...

Driving that May of 1968 on the road to Christ in the Desert, a new Benedictine monastery in the Chama River Canyon of northern New Mexico, Merton was bombarded by impressions. Snow up high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and then a marvelous long line of snowless, arid mountains, clean long shapes stretching for miles under pure light. Mesas, full rivers, cottonwoods, sagebrush, high red cliffs, piñon pines. Most impressed of all by the miles of emptiness.

After leaving the highway, he drove thirteen miles down a rutted dirt road and arrived at the remote monastery, a place of perfect silence. Inside the adobe church he marveled at the images of Santos as serious as painted desert birds. He spent the next several days hiking alone in the canyon. Small pine, cedar, a gang of gray jays, the cold, muddy Chama River—his eyes were hungry for all of it. He could use up rolls of film on nothing but the rocks along the canyon walls. The whole canyon replete with emptiness.

One day he lunched with Georgia O’Keeffe. He photographed Pedernal, the mesa dominating the skyline and one of O’Keeffe’s great subjects, and asked her what one sees from the top. O’Keeffe said, “You see the whole world.”

Each morning he read René Daumal’s Mount Analogue, which he declared a very fine book. “The gateway to the invisible must be visible,” wrote Daumal.

Whether Merton sought God here in this desert canyon or along the desolate Mendocino coast or in the deep hush of the redwoods, he began to suspect that his search for the perfect hermitage was a chimera. The country which is nowhere is the real home. His real home was le point vierge, the place in himself reserved only for God. Perhaps I have an obligation to preserve the stillness, the silence, the poverty, the virginal point of pure nothingness which is at the center of all other loves.

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