Monk drives jeep

“Yesterday Father Cellarer lent me the jeep. I did not ask for it, he just lent it to me out of the goodness of his heart, so that I would be able to go out to the woods on the other side of the knobs. I had never driven a car before.  … I drove the jeep madly into the forest in a rosy fog of confusion and delight. We romped over trestles and I sang ‘O Mary I love you,’ went splashing through puddles a foot deep, rushed madly into the underbrush and backed out again.

Finally I got the thing back to the monastery covered with mud from stem to stern. I stood in choir at Vespers, dizzy with the thought: ‘I have been driving a jeep.’

Father Cellarer just made me a sign that I must never, never, under any circumstances, take the jeep out again.”

Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas