Thomas Merton

Anyone here who has had the misfortune to stumble upon my postings on this particular forum would by now realise that I have some admiration for Thomas Merton. For me this is not "hero worship", I see him more as a mentor, through whom I can come to my own understanding - Merton himself was very rarely didactic in any real sense of the word. Being a Trappist monk, his published books necessarily passed through the censorship system of the Catholic Church. Given that those books included essays on Buddhism and a traslation of Chuang Tzu, this indicates that the censorship system is perhaps not as stiffling of free thought as some might suppose. Yet it is for me in his letters - and Journals - that he speaks to my own tastes, and these escaped censorship in any real meaning of the word.

I first read Merton when I picked up "The Seven Storey Mountain" in my local library. This book is autobiographical and tells of Merton's early life ( not one of religious indoctrination ), his conversion to Catholocism, and ends with his entry into the monastery of Gethsemane in Kentucky, U.S.A. I got about half way through before giving up. I found it over pious and stifling. Next I found a collection of his letters (The Hidden Ground of Love) in a second hand bookshop. It was priced at only ?4, and being a skinflint at heart, always having an eye for a bargain, I snapped it up. Once again, after about 100 pages I left it aside. Yet about a couple of years later, for some reason I picked it up again and this time read through to the end. It was pure delight. Merton wrote to so many people, of so many different faiths - and to some of none - and without betraying at any time his own fidelity to Christ, opened his heart to all, saying "yes" where he could.

Since then I have built up my own little library of Merton. All of his published letters (5 volumes), a few of his Journals (published in 7 volumes) plus a few of his other books, mainly those concerned with Buddhism/Zen.

Anyway, for those interested, I will now and again dip into my books and find one ot two bits and pieces to post on this forum. Obviously everyone is free to respond as they wish, but if this just degenerates into another slanging match I'll just depart.....

The first couple will be "copy and paste" jobs from another thread on another forum.

I suppose the impression can be given, when a thread is composed of quotes alone, that the words originate from some ethereal source and not from a concrete human being. Whether or not this is the case, I would just like to speak of Merton's own very lovable humanity. There is a wonderful photo of Merton in the Lion edition of "The Intimate Merton" that is worth a million words. The caption is "This is the old hillbilly who knows where the still is", and it truly captures the man as he must have been known to his own friends, full of fun and humour. The expression on his face is a picture indeed! When Henri Nouwen met him, he spoke of an initial reaction of disppointment as nothing "very special, profound or spiritual" occured............

Maybe I expected something unusual, something to talk about with others or to write home about. But Thomas Merton proved to be a very down-to-earth, healthy human being who was not going to perform to satisfy our curiosity. He was one of us...............(later) I became very grateful for that one unspectacular encounter. I found that whenever I was tempted to let myself be carried away by lofty ideas or cloudy aspirations, I had only to remind myself of that one afternoon to bring myself back to earth. (With) my mind's eye I saw him again as that earthy man, dressed in sloppy blue jeans, loud, laughing, friendly and unpretentious..................

There is a passage in one of his letters (which I am totally unable to locate at the moment!) where he relates an episode following the ordination of one of his best friends, Dan Walsh, in 1967. Following the ceremony, Merton and a few of his other friends got just a little tiddly on alcohol and began falling around with laughter. Looking on was a group of nuns who appeared just a little shocked! "Another pillar of the Church had fallen" comments Merton.

Merton has also been called an "anti-monk".....

I see clearer than ever that I am not a monk.........................I expect to live for a few more years, hoping that I will not go nuts...............This, I think, is about the best I can hope for. It sums up the total of my expectations for the immediate future. If on top of this the Lord sees fit in His mercy to admit me to a non-monastic corner of heaven, among the beatniks and pacifists and other maniacs, I will be exceedingly grateful. Doubtless there will be a few pseudo-hermits among them and we will all sit around and look at each other and wonder how we made it. Up above will be the monks, with a clearer view of their own status and a more profound capacity to appreciate the meaning of status and the value of having one.....

Maybe it can be all summed up by a comment made by Merton when visited in 1954 by his friend Mark Van Doren. Van Doren remarked that Merton had not changed much. Merton replied....."Why should I? Here our duty is to be more ourselves, not less"

True communication on the deepest level is more than a simple sharing of ideas, conceptual knowledge, or formulated truth...............And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless, it is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear brothers and sisters, we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.

Well, this seems to be going down like a house on fire!

But I'll continue to amuse myself. Here are some words of Merton on "true" religion. I realise that most here would see that as a oxymoron. But Thomas Merton's definition is for me virtually the polar opposite of what passes for religion in most cases.

True religion is......freedom from domination, freedom to live one's own spiritual life, freedom to seek the highest truth, unabashed by any human pressure or any collective demand, the ability to say one's own "yes" and one's own "no" and not merely to echo the "yes" and the "no" of state, party, corporation, army or system. This is inseparable from authentic religion. It is one of the deepest and most fundamental needs of the human person, perhaps the deepest and most crucialneed of the human person as such.

( From "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander" )

Not so, please carry on, it is all very good reading,,,of course, he is one of my favorites among the many!

Rec,

I've placed you on my Christmas Card list.

To everyone else, you can now blame Rec for the continuation of this thread, not me.....

If the writer of the Gospel attributed to St John was true in his intuitions, then there is a "light that lights everyone who comes into the world." In that Gospel, that light is identified with "the Word", Christ. This in turn, in much Christian thought, is identified with "wisdom" and the inviolable potential in all for freedom/creativity, and the capacity to love. However, as the Gospel says, the light "shines in the darkness but the darkness comprehends it not."

This being the case, when the idea of "evangelism" comes up, this should not involve the belief that anything can be given to anybody, but only that "darkness" be removed. And for the partially enlightened (!!) this can only be accomplished within dialogue, with being vulnerable ourselves to possible change, within mutuality of insight.

Well, this is only said to seek to put the following words of Merton in context. They are from a letter written to D.T.Suzuki, a Zen Buddhist, and is included in the collection of letters entitiled "The Hidden Ground of Love"..........

I want to speak for this Western world.................which has in past centuries broken in upon you and brought you our own confusion, our own alienation, our own decrepitude, our lack of culture, our lack of faith...........If I wept until the end of the world, I could not signify enough of what this tragedy means. If only we had thought of coming to you to learn something..............If only we had thought of coming to you and loving you for what you are in yourselves, instead of trying to make you over into our own image and likeness. For me it is clearly evident that you and I have in common and share most intimately precisely that which, in the eyes of conventional Westerners, would seem to separate us. The fact that you are a Zen Buddhist and I am a Christian monk, far from separating us, makes us most like one another. How many centuries is it going to take for people to discover this fact?......

Merton and Suzuki maintained a long correspondence, and actually met once in New York when Merton for once escaped the confines of the monastery. One of the best exchanges is included in the book by Merton entitled "Zen and the Birds of Appetite" where the subject is the "fall of man". ( Obviously, apples, snakes and such do not really feature much in this exchange, being of a more mature nature! )

But no time for that now............sighs of relief all round!

A young relative of mine attends high school. One of her teachers has tried to teach her about ontology. She has gone to a camp for summer break, but she left some of her school papers her on my kitchen table. To wit:

Parmenides: all is one.
Zeno: There is no many.
Plato: the one is
Badiou: the one is not
Deleuze: the one is becoming

Now I must add to the list:

Thomas Merton: we are already one. But we imagine that we are not

8)

WeNowSix,

Welcome to the rather exclusive "I have contributed to the Thomas Merton Thread" Club, WeNowThree.

Agreed, For Merton his words are not a limp expression of sentimentality, but a considered and implied ontology. We - all - are part of the "hidden ground of love for which there needs no explanation", as he says himself in one of his letters.

Yet this implies - at least for him - no dissolving of personality, nor individual uniqueness, but a finding of our true self.

Another quote.....

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

Which can be followed by one from C.S.Lewis...

...life is not like a river but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good.

Just things to reflect upon.

8)

Rivers and trees, they offer interesting images. Astronomers think the universe moves away from its root. Technology provides more tools. I don't know if we get better. Maybe we get more aware of our faults. When Joshua killed the citizens of Jericho, no one but the participants knew it happened.

Rivers and trees keep appearing. There is a Buddhist image in one of the Theravada Texts, where our minds are likened to a helpless man being swept along by an irresistable current; the man continuely grabs out at overhanging branches, rocky outcrops, makes the mad snatch but is always swept on and on. A tree appears in the very first Psalm. I like real trees myself - the complete chaos, held within a fundamental symmetry, seems to have a calming effect on me.......But I'm waffling. Maybe too much time on my hands.

I think "perfection" is an awful word, and the quest for it futile. Especially if we assume our empirical/phenomenal ego/self is is some sort of object to be polished, to shine over and above other such selves/objects. I think we become "better" by becoming aware of our faults, perhaps better still when we can accept them. At least then there is some slight chance of accepting others, rather than handing out judgements. There is a female Buddhist who said that "loving-kindness" must begin with ourselves, and that it does not mean trying to change ourselves, more the realisation that we can still be crazy after all these years. Encouragement indeed!

Not sure just where Joshua comes into it. Was he the one with the trumpet?

Anyway, another Merton quote, from "Day of a Stranger", a short meditation on his life as a monk, or "anti-monk, whatever he was....

The spiritual life is something that people worry about when they are so busy with something else they think they ought to be spiritual. Spiritual life is guilt. Up here in the woods is seen the New Testament: that is to say, the wind comes through the trees and you breathe it.

I mentioned Joshua as an example of Jack?s ripening good. That?s Jack like in CS Lewis. A friend of mine reads Lewis like you read Merton. My friend is a Lutheran Minister, and he always refers to Lewis as Jack.

Of course I have no idea what Jack might have meant by ripening good, but he might have meant progress is good.

If Joshua and the Hebrews had killed the citizens of Jericho in the twentieth century instead of the Bronze Age, we would call the act barbaric like any number of twentieth century events. By comparison, good has ripened.

Merton?s idea that religion is freedom from domination has a scientific ally. My niece found this on You Tube . I remember seeing it in prime time back in the seventies. Joshua, who might have believed in absolute knowledge, might also wonder why we make such a fuss about the Holocaust.

Well, I'm no minister, and I do read a lot other than Merton! Currently I'm reading "Shantaram", a true story involving the Bombay (Mumbai) slums and its criminal underworld, and also takes in Afghanistan during the time of the Russian invasion. Very good.

Maybe there is some general "ripening", though I tend to thing less of the "general" and more of the singular! At the same time as Joshua, and those who lauded him, there were also the OT prophets who cried out for social justice and condemned the hypocrisy of those they saw around them. No one HAS to be a "child of their age" - though there seems no magic formula to avoid it. Its true that many today call the holocaust barbaric, along with the Five Year plans, Cultural Revolutions and all the other acts of "ethnic cleansing", yet THEY have all happened NOW, not then. Perhaps it is a case of "technology providing more tools"............

I have Bronowski's book "The Ascent of Man", and certainly his words.....I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken, words Bronowski uttered at Auschwitz, need to be reflected on by and taken to heart by anyone who thinks at all, for a host of reasons.

Anyway, thanks for your interest and contribution. No further quotes at the moment.........

Google "merton ontology."

From your posts, Merton sounded more like theologian than philosopher, so I googled "merton ontology."

Your TFS post, which includes the following quote is fifth on the list.

"Agreed, For Merton his words are not a limp expression of sentimentality, but a considered and implied ontology. . "

I would say he was neither theologian nor philosopher, more a contemplative. And though he did spend many hours most days in silent contemplation his main method was via the written word. Thousands of letters, a daily journal, plus the published books.

Anyway, best not to pigeonhole him, or anybody, or ourselves for that matter.

Glad I've now had my 15 minutes of "fame" on Google. I can now relax and hopefully return to obscurity.

8)

It is out of the nothing, the void, of our own self that we freely create the paradise in which we walk with God. (From the letters)