[Shuster was an American journalist, nonfiction writer, and educator who was known by many as a modern interpreter of Roman Catholicism. In the following positive review of The Sign of Jonas, Shuster praises Merton's vivid and insightful depiction of life in a monastery.]

I am quite sure there has been no book like this. [The Sign of Jonas] is a diary kept during five years spent in a Trappist monastery by a young monk who, as everyone doubtless knows, can write unusually well. Of course many others have described their experiences as members of religious orders, but generally they have either been too holy to tell us much of general interest, or too human to care a great deal about holiness. Thomas Merton—Father Louis of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance—leaves no one in doubt that he has been earnestly trying to become a saint, and yet he has kept on being flesh and blood. He also tempts you to surmise that most of the things you have been fussing about are really not terribly important, without however creating the illusion that the peace of the cloister—in case you should be tempted to yearn for it—is devoid of a great deal of infighting with God, other people and one's self.

The book is by a man who has clung to all his five senses, which means that he is a poet. But he has acquired something more, too, and it is rare and in a way very strange. It was not yet to be found in The Seven Storey Mountain. One can perhaps call it the discipline of affection for other human beings—a beautiful thing to have come by and not to be had for the asking, as this diary unmistakably reveals.

Father Merton likens himself to Jonas the Prophet, who had his own ideas about the destination he wished to reach, and whom the Lord thereupon summarily clamped into the whale's belly after having suggested to that tractable beast a path to follow. As a monk he had elected to lead a life of solitude and contemplation. Soon, however, he found himself immersed in the affairs of a community which spent more time running tractors than reading The Cloud of Unknowing. He was virtually chained to a typewriter because his Superior decided that a few books would be helpful.

There were other chores, too. He was assigned to pump theological doctrine into the heads of novices who, one gathers, were not less immune to the disease of learning than students elsewhere normally are. He sometimes thought of going off to join a more senobitic community, or of retiring alone to a hermitage. But wise counsel succeeded in dissuading him. Father Merton relates delightfully that a fellow monk who had elected to go off into the woods by himself discovered so many people coming to him for advice that there was nothing for it but to return to the monastery for a measure of peace and quiet.

No doubt the heart of the mystery in his own case was that he, who had knocked at the gates of Gethsemani Monastery in quest of loneliness, proved to be in large measure responsible for the fact that so many human beings came rushing thither. There were those who wished to join the community, those who were seeking recollection and spiritual counsel, and of course those who suffered from that odd, insatiable curiosity for a glimpse of something unusual that had been called to their attention.

All of them, the pity, the humor, the misery and the often veiled beauty of them, are caught in the clear lens of this book. Their snores beat upon the ear of one who watches in the night, their sweat in the sticky Kentucky heat is rank in the nostrils. One has in one's mind's eye a glimpse of this young monk wrapping about his spirit the hairshirt of distaste, sometimes as barbed as loathing, so that it might become a bush of brambles wherein Saint Francis could impale himself anew in order to become Francis once again.

All is said with unforgettable definiteness (though seldom mordantly), in that mood akin to self-flagellation which all must no doubt learn to cultivate who wish to rediscover the old truth that it is beyond the shadow of any doubt easier to love the Lord God than to have affection for one's neighbor. At least, that is, when the neighbor puts up no fences.

Not that loving God is easy either. Father Merton's book is filled with gnarled and also grateful notations on the wrestling. It is likewise a report concerning victory, which one must bear in mind was not written with the idea that a vast public would read it. Some of these words about the search for insight into the Divine affection and the answers deemed to have been received are much too moving to be commented upon. They must be read, as are comparable sayings in Ramon Lull and Traherne. But there is much prose poetry in them, too, about which I shall confess that I was at first somewhat dubious, only to sense later on how fresh and clear these waters were when they welled up, and how thankful one might well be that it was so.

Though one may find it disconcerting to hear a young man tell us how keenly he has felt the joy of anticipated death, it is probably only because one has for a brief time forgotten that on this theme Plato and the Psalmist are in agreement. But it is Bonaventure, the great Franciscan, whom Father Merton most definitely echoes, even if he does not often refer to him. No doubt it is strange that the hour in which such things are written for Americans happens to be that of the triumph of their technocracy; but it is also the time of Korea and Prague.

This book is made unmistakably real and almost, at times, unbearably poignant by the fact that the exuberance of youth so often wells up through it with rapture, impatience and even bluster. Literary art has its place in the monkish scheme of things. Father Merton can dash off a note which all but sets Robert Lowell beside Milton, or strew flowers at Dylan Thomas' feet with almost bacchanalian joy. He hopes to write like Eliot, or not at all. There is a fleet but distinct echoing of Hopkins in a jagged little entry about a falcon swooping down on its prey. Nor can one think of any of our books in which so many dawn songs are sung with a sheer trembling of joy and gratitude. I fear it makes the meditations of Thoreau sitting on the edge of Walden Pond sound a little like the memoirs of a mildly intoxicated Transcendentalist greatly enjoying a fog.

Sun and forest move across Father Merton's line of vision for their own sakes as well as for whatever help religious analogy can derive from them. And when in the grip of stark tragedy (say, because a plane has carried its human cargo to swift death almost at the monastery's doorstep) this priest is not a reporter but, one might well think, the kinsman of some such painter as Georges Rouault. He can, to be sure, upon occasion be rather banal, too, as when he suddenly becomes inexplicably pious out of respect for something people are expected to be pious about.

At such moments the reader will no doubt feel that though priest may be poet and poet priest, human nature cannot always rid itself easily of the raiment which is prescribed. But one does not often feel let down with that kind of whimper. To compensate, there is the element of surprise. When Evelyn Waugh visited Gethsemani, he professed to feel that it "looked Irish." That was no doubt the sharp-tongued Englishman's way of saying that he had seen more notable scenes. At any rate, it left Father Merton with his mouth wide open in astonishment blended with a smile.

Shall one then conclude that the business of being a Trappist must of necessity seem so far away from the normal concerns of men as they usually are that reading a diary devoted to it will prove a static experience at best? I believe that this book has, in spite of its implicit discontinuity, a vivid, satisfying, almost dramatic progression. In it on the one hand a monk takes on the stature of the priesthood. On the other, the conflict between elected silence and the impact of the shouting world mounts higher and higher in intensity.

If one is so minded, this struggle will seem both more exacting and more significant than are those usually waged in our world for the discovery of Achilles' heel. For here youthfully discerned time, rich and in spite of all alluring, is in a bout with Eternity, and like is constantly pitted against dislike. The chronicle is deep, beautiful and absorbing.

George N. Shuster, "Silent Searcher in a Shouting World," in The New York Times Book Review, February 8, 1953, pp. 1, 30.