This week marked the 40th anniversary of the sudden death of Thomas Merton.
A few appreciations have appeared here and there, with some tut-tutting that Merton is still “controversial” in some Catholic circles.be
Well,one person’s “controversial” is another’s “just not canonized yet, okay?”
I have a deep appreciation forMerton. I have taught and passed on his books. He was a brilliant writer, and I think that, more than anything else, is what draws me to him. Not just that I appreciate fine writing, but that so many of his struggles are the struggle of an artist (or, to be humble, would-be artist.)
Reading the first couple of volumes in the journals really brought that home to me, since the questions of vocatio – not simply monastic, but also artistic – loomed so large in them.
But Merton was human and like any of us, not beyond criticism.
Nor is Merton everyone’s cup of tea.
For me, as interesting as find him, and as helpful it is for me to see things with him and through his eyes, I am often left a bit dissatisfied by Merton, as if I need to move on and out. Yes, he was a contemplative, and perhaps that is part of the problem, for me, at least. Knowing myself, the existential quest, even if it is God-centered, can only take me so far. The goal of my life is not to know myself perfectly. It is to serve and love as Jesus did.
I am not suggesting this last point is absent from Merton. It just does not seem to be the center of inquiry, exploration and energy. Which is fine. It is all a piece of the puzzle, but it does not define the entire puzzle, at least for me. Sometimes reading Merton can inspire me and answer questions, but sometimes it can tempt me to self-absorption. It all depends.
So talk about Merton. Promote him, thank him, question him. It’s all okay. You get the idea from some quarters that it is far more permissible to critique the Pope (any pope) than it is to say “hmmm” about aspects of the thought of certain other figures. I’ve never quite understood that. Even as far as actually canonized saints go – “canonization” does not equal “perfect” or “beyond critique” or “a perfect fit for everyone’s spirituality.”
Why do you fly from the drowned shores of Galilee,
From the sands and the lavender water?
Why do you leave the ordinary world, Virgin of Nazareth,
The yellow fishing boats, the farms,
The winesmelling yards and low cellars
Or the oilpress, and the women by the well?
Why do you fly those markets,
Those suburban gardens,
The trumpets of the jealous lilies,
Leaving them all, lovely among the lemon trees?
You have trusted no town
With the news behind your eyes.
You have drowned Gabriel’s word in thoughts like seas
And turned toward the stone mountain
To the treeless places.
Virgin of God, why are your clothes like sails?
The day Our Lady, full of Christ,
Entered the dooryard of her relative
Did not her steps, light steps, lay on the paving leaves
like gold?
Did not her eyes as grey as doves
Alight like the peace of a new world upon that house, upon
miraculous Elizabeth?
Her salutation
Sings in the stone valley like a Charterhouse bell:
And the unborn saint John
Wakes in his mother’s body,
Bounds with the echoes of discovery.
Sing in your cell, small anchorite!
How did you see her in the eyeless dark?
What secret syllable
Woke your young faith to the mad truth
That an unborn baby could be washed in the Spirit of God?
Oh burning joy!
What seas of life were planted by that voice!
With what new sense
Did your wise heart receive her Sacrament,
And know her cloistered Christ?
You need no eloquence, wild bairn,
Exulting in your hermitage.
Your ecstasy is your apostolate,
For whom to kick is contemplata tradere.
Your joy is the vocation of Mother Church’s hidden children –
Those who by vow lie buried in the cloister or the hermitage;
The speechless Trappist, or the grey, granite Carthusian,
The quiet Carmelite, the barefoot Clare, Planted in the night of
contemplation, Sealed in the dark and waiting to be born.
Night is our diocese and silence is our ministry
Poverty our charity and helplessness our tongue-tied
sermon.
Beyond the scope of sight or sound we dwell upon the air
Seeking the world’s gain in an unthinkable experience.
We are exiles in the far end of solitude, living as listeners
With hearts attending to the skies we cannot understand:
Waiting upon the first far drums of Christ the Conqueror,
Planted like sentinels upon the world’s frontier.
But in the days, rare days, when our Theotokos
Flying the prosperous world
Appears upon our mountain with her clothes like sails,
Then, like the wise, wild baby,
The unborn John who could not see a thing
We wake and know the Virgin Presence
Receive her Christ into our night
With stabs of an intelligence as white as lightning.
Cooled in the flame of God’s dark fire
Washed in His gladness like a vesture of new flame
We burn like eagles in His invincible awareness
And bound and bounce with happiness,
Leap in the womb, our cloud, our faith, our element,
Our contemplation, our anticipated heaven
Till Mother Church sings like an Evangelist.
Perfect timing they read that very passage from Luke today, obviously that’s why you picked this poem.
I love this because he re-states more elegantly what I thought when they read Luke:
“What secret syllable
Woke your young faith to the mad truth”
and this:
“Did not her steps, light steps, lay on the paving leaves
like gold?”
The only Merton I’ve ever read was when I was a Zen enthusiast before I converted. I imagine I’d see him differently if I read him now.
Andrew Sullivan writes of Thomas Merton’s death:
“…what a merciful way to be brought back to God. No anxiety; no fear of death; no forewarning.”
Which interested me because not long ago I’d finished a lecturer’s tapes regarding Shakespeare’s time, and how a death like Merton’s would be seen as awful and horrible then. Times change!
Back in Shakespeare’s age it was taken for granted that one would want time to prepare for death because back then the state of your soul at death was seen as crucial. Nowadays that’s seen as unfair and a technicality. No one now, for example, would delay Baptism as Constantine did until one’s deathbed.
Now everyone seems to think everyone goes straight to Heaven. Which makes the idea of suffering before death or Confession before death almost passe’.
Merton was important to me during my conversion, but I also find something missing, and I can’t place my finger on it. I think I always felt that, in his heart, he was holding out on his vocation. Now that’s true for all of us. Maybe it’s just unusual to see it in writing, and if we were all honest, we’d sound that way to others too. I can’t say I consider him a “master”.
I also never liked his poetry. In the same sentence, he uses a clumsy word “Theotokos” and then a great image “clothes like sails”. A great “Night is our diocese”, but then “You need no eloquence, wild bairn, Exulting in your hermitage”. It’s just too much. For me, the trick of poetry is producing images in the common tongue. Making unexpected connections that suprise or delight. The simpler and more commonplace the language, the more stunned I am at the images and connections. I like to feel that the poem was always inside of me, but the poet managed to get it down first! He sounds like he’s trying too hard. Suprise me! Make me wonder why I didn’t think of it first.
“Sing in your cell,” (good)
small anchorite!” (bad)
There were some years when I was completely taken with Merton. Now, when I read this sentence:
“For me, as interesting as find him, and as helpful it is for me to see things with him and through his eyes, I am often left a bit dissatisfied by Merton, as if I need to move on and out.”
I feel exactly the same. And I think Thomas Merton would say the same about himself. In fact he did, in many ways. That is, “moving on and out”.
I think he imbibed too much of the spirit of his age – and that this imbibing was very paradoxical with him: Later being a hermit, one who couldn’t seem to become a real enough hermit (by his own admission) this lack, this disaffection with the (modern) world and its falsity (some of it sneaking into the monstery, at least as regards much of his view) had a paradoxical way of keeping him bound to it. He was a sincere and devout and contemplative seeker, but then the words would intrude, those words wanting to be the incarnation of his experience. In short, he had that strange position of being, or seeking to be the “nobody” who lives in pure contemplation (to be a holy monk really) and then makes words about that silence – the silence where one does not talk.
Much later he also succumbed somewhat to syncretism. And I very much agree with Holly on his poetry. Much of his poetry is enthralling, startling, but he often seems to live from one stanza to the next; he’s not terribly concerned about a thread. This of course can be a strength with him. Much of his imagery is beautiful and prayerful. Then some of his imagery is – how can one say – religiously redundant. Or redundantly religious, I don’t know. Too much, ‘This piece of bread is the papal staff of our cloistered hunger’…okay, I made that one up.
There is much good in Merton’s writings. One should read him with some discernment though, some caution at times.
Here is one of my favorites (especially the last few lines):
After the Night Office—Gethsemani Abbey
It is not yet the gray and frosty time
When barns ride out of the night like ships:
We do not see the Brothers, bearing lanterns,
Sink in the quiet mist,
As various as the spirits who, with lamps, are sent
To search our souls’ Jerusalems
Until our houses are at rest
And minds enfold the Word, our Guest.
Praises and canticles anticipate
Each day the singing bells that wake the sun,
But now our psalmody is done.
Our hasting souls outstrip the day:
Now, before dawn, they have their noon.
The Truth that transubstantiates the body’s night
Has made our minds His temple tent:
Open the secret eye of faith
And drink these deeps of invisible light.
The weak walls
Of the world fall
And heaven, in floods, comes pouring in:
Sink from your shallows, soul, into eternity,
And slake your wonder at that deep-lake spring.
We touch the rays we cannot see,
We feel the light that seems to sing.
Go back to bed, red sun, you are too late,
And hide behind Mount Olivet—
For like the flying moon, held prisoner,
Within the branches of a juniper,
So in the cages of our consciousness
The Dove of God is prisoner yet:
Unruly sun, go back to bed.
But now the lances of the morning
Fire all their gold against the steeple and the water tower.
Returning to the windows of our deep abode of peace,
Emerging at our conscious doors
We find our souls all soaked in grace, like Gideon’s fleece.
His early work on the Eucharist…”The Living Bread”….I remember as excellent as was his first ” Seeds of Contemplation”. Then I overdosed on more of him and found myself at a Trappist monastery and at a contemplative Benedictine one on a mountain top exploring the possibility.
But it was not to be…. but the chief idea that I took away from Merton forever was when he explained that even in the holiest monastery and in the holiest contemplative, there could be too much attachment to even the holiest experiences and graces which are still not God in Himself….who alone we should be that to which we are “too” attached. The monk was to be attached from even the highest contemplative experiences….to let them go afterwards. This was consonant with St. John of the Cross’ idea to let all things go…..even great mystical experience. If it is from God St. John noted, it will do its work without one having to perfectly discern whether it was from God. Both men allowed for a distance between us and all experience that was not precisely God Himself.
And his other fascinating idea was that upon which he and his confessor at Gethsemane agreed upon: that his desire to leave the Trappists and become a Carthusian was a temptation from the devil….a coveting of what belonged to others simply because it was more perfect still…..the devil will tempt toward good if he has no other choice and if it is not the good that we belong within.
Merton a saint?…no…due partly to the late life fall in respect to the nurse. But only two Popes since the 13th century have been canonized…(wink to Amy):
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12272b.htm
with only several others being at the blessed stage.
Correction: “who alone is Him to whom we should be “too” attached. The monk was to be dettached from even the highest contemplative experiences…”
A very wise post and a wonderful tribute.
I can only say that a number of years ago I went astray from the Faith and Thomas Merton was one of the “recommended” writers of that time of confusion in my life. My sacramental life suffered, my conscience became more elastic, my commitment to daily Mass went west. One day I woke up and realized “something” was missing; it was Jesus – I’d strayed from the love of my life. From that time on I only read books that were Christ centered and no matter how clever the writer, if he wasn’t leading me to Christ he was of no use to me. There are so many wonderful spiritual masters in the Catholic Church – Teresa of Avil, St. John of the Cross, Little Therese, Elizabeth of the Trinity, and yes John Paul 11, and not forgetting B16 and many many more. I’m no theologian so I trust the Church to guide me. Also I don’t like the way Thomas Merton died; one of my favourite parts of the life of the saints is their death bed – always touches me. Even looking at that great big heart of Pope John Paul 11 as he walked the last mile home – extraordinarily beautiful. Don’t stray from the path. Blessings – Rene
Merton was a mixed bag of holy tricks and human foibles. A talkaholic monk and lover of silence. A zenless zenner. A bohemian trapped in the vow-mines of kentucky. Maybe he overfarmed his fame. Some of his words sing-zing angelically. Others plop…
I sorta love him. But would rather have coffee with St. Teresa.
I guess I didn’t mean to sound so negative. The one thing I think I will always remember about Merton is something he said in a novice conference I listened to on tape. He was telling the novices that they can’t have poverty of spirit without having some actual poverty in their lives. He said that they, despite their vows, were not poor. They had food, cloths, shelter, work. The didn’t wonder how they were going to get by tomorrow. I hadn’t thought of it that way before. I remember now, when I “think” I am suffering, that I have never gone a day without food. I have spent every night in a bed under a roof. I have never been attacked on my way to church. I have never been in war. If I am sick, I can get some medicine. I really do have a lot of “stuff”. Maybe I don’t have the job I want, but I manage to work. I have family and friends that love me. The world is full of things to learn. I have hope. I know I have a home in Heaven. How could I have ever been poor? If I ever find myself really poor, may God help me endure it, and may God help those who now endure it.
Will I ever understand poverty of spirit? I don’t know and I don’t worry about it. Give alms, tell Jesus “Thank you”, and count your blessings. I will always remember Merton for that.
The goal of my life is not to know myself perfectly. It is to serve and love as Jesus did.
I know we’re supposed to talk about Merton here, but I had to say Thank You to Amy for these two sentences. Most of my life has been struggle of one sort of another, but almost all of my own making. Only in the past four years or so have I been able to leave all that, but until I read those two sentences, I didn’t realize what had happened, what had changed in me, or even that I had changed.
Everything is clear in perspective now. Thank you, again.
Thomas Merton very well embodies the Catholic culture and spirituality of his time and place– with all its wonders and ambiguities. His emphasis on his own self and experiences cannot simply be attributed to egoism, but it is a representation of the cultural discourse of the era. Some folks will recognize in his writings their own movement through the pre-concliar and post-conciliar period, with all its attendant dialectices and dissonance. I think that it is the current discomfort with the post-conciliar legacy that makes some in the current Catholic ethos uncomfortable with his continued influence and contribution. However, others see in him, their own struggle for attentiveness, receptivity and the death to self that is required for all those who risk the depths of authentic prayer. He may never prove to be worthy of canonization, but many will likely continue to find in his writings a fellow sojourner and spiritual friend, who like themselves, is simultaneously gifted by divine grace, and yet still a sinner in need of mercy.
Merton brings me to that scriptural story about the one who said he wouldn’t serve, but who in the end did, and the one who said he would serve, but who in the end did not.
It wasn’t until I read his “official biography” that I had to weigh what he actually did, how he treated others in his life who appeared to be closest to him and who seemed to have great sympathy for him and were faithful friends. He didn’t treat them very…well…honestly or with equal measure of maturity. I think that was due to his constant battle with impulsiveness and the pleasure or release that it gave him….always finding a way around rules and the people who stood for them. In that, yes, the culture of the time aided him in its rationale. It wasn’t the greatest culture for stability – and that vow was then a difficult one to obtain. He also probably learned uncertainty within his own “dysfunctional” upbringing and his need to survive in unpredictable surroundings disguised as stable. Like so many, he could see such untamed personal needs within himself – usually after some great public failing and “being caught” – and then become rather depressed over it. And that is what drew and draws so many – the usual “being human”. That is also what drew him into his ever unsatisfied need for more solitude….or at least his idea of what it had to be for him. And like so many of those times of turmoil I think he believed he found some kind of answer just by siding with the questioners of the culture and not those too sacrificed to it by, well, just circumstances. Why the honesty in the title “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander”.
In the end I think his own need to prove his ability to “love” was limited to more a proof that he could become overly emotionally caught up – like “those others” – with never any honest intention of realistic commitment to that one other! Sometimes I blame more those in authority over him, to guide him, because he really needed their guidance. But, rather, they too, in such times, were willing to let the blind lead the blind!
But then, what an amazing seeming prophecy of 9/11!!
My problem with Merton is just as you said: “The goal of my life is not to know myself perfectly. It is to serve and love as Jesus did” and this Marian poem illustrates the problem with him perfectly.
He raises the question of:
Why do you fly from the drowned shores of Galilee,
From the sands and the lavender water?
Why do you leave the ordinary world, Virgin of Nazareth…
and then never offers a single poetic line in answer to that question, even though any faithful, whether seminarian or laity could offer a dozen replies. Maybe she “left” to serve God? To proclaim Jesus in her apparitions? To demonstrate perfect obedience? To be the invisible Ark that contains the New Covenant?
I mean, he starts with such a great question, with such great poetic affectation, and then says nothing about the faith. Yes, he did hold himself back from the faith.
I remember being greatly taken with Merton, then gradually less so. He was a product of his times. Maybe he had some good things to say. But the endless traveling and writing, being lionized and then sailing off onto the dangerous waters of eastern philosophy – was that all so good? And the unprepared death? And to what extent did his abbey see him, perhaps unconsciously, as a marketing tool? Perhaps he should have disappeared into community life as Fr. Louis? Who knows?
But that was the time. I think what will last is the autobiography.
and then never offers a single poetic line in answer to that question, even though any faithful, whether seminarian or laity could offer a dozen replies. Maybe she “left” to serve God? To proclaim Jesus in her apparitions? To demonstrate perfect obedience? To be the invisible Ark that contains the New Covenant?
Isn’t Merton’s answer in this poem is that she left to go to visit Elizabeth? Sometimes we expect poems to give us the profound answer when it’s all about red wheelbarrows and white chickens.
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15537
Brian
Please, people. If Merton doesn’t do it for you, fine. But to fault the man, or to undermine the importance of his life or his teaching, by claiming that you don’t care for his accidental death — how very absurd. Let’s hope none of us meets a sudden demise, lest someone foolishly claim that it isn’t classy — or saintly! — enough.
I guess there are different smokes for different folks. I have been reading Merton for over 40 years, and I never tire of him. He leads me deeper into my faith and invites me to greater intimacy with God. More than any other spiritual writer, I consider Merton to be my guide, and I trust him totally not to lead me down a false road.
Merton helped bring me, along with 10000 others, into the Church with his Seven Story Mountain. Anymore, though, his prose drives me up the wall with its absolutes – everything, nothing, always, never – it’s nearly as annoying as Scott Hahn’s @#$!@# puns.
I think, for me, the key to understanding Merton is the passage–I forget what book it was in–where he said that he thought he needed to stop writing books for publication, and his spiritual director agreed, but his superiors didn’t.
The money he brought to Gesthemani was considerable.
Yet I think that writing was in the end harmful to him.
In a lot of ways, I see in Fr. M. Louis a microcosm of the church in the period of the 40s-60s, and a manifestation of the malaise that found it’s expression in the 70s,80s and 90s.