William Higginbotham

1 April 2003

Western Civilization Since 1500

Dr. K. Wilburn

Thomas Merton; A Man in History

Once in a great while does a man of simplicity and deep thought comes along to silently change and influence the face of culture and the way we look at the greatest issues of our times and the way we look at ourselves. One such man was Thomas Merton, a Trappist Monk from the Monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Bardstown Kentucky. He was a man of peace, who knew intimately the horrors of war.

It has been said War is the major points of historical monument. Perhaps this is so, if so, how ironic is it that a man who dedicated his entire life to peace was born during war and died during a war. Thomas Merton was born on January 31 1915 in the French mountains on the border of Spain. He was born during World War I, “the war to end all wars” and he died on December 10 1968 during the Vietnam War. His father Owen Merton was from New Zealand and mother Ruth was American. Both of Merton’s parents were painters. His mother died when he was six years old and his father when he was 15, of a brain tumor.

Thomas Merton early schooling in France; at age ten he was in a Montessori school in Monteban France. He was reputed to be a lonely and sickly child at this time of his life. His mothers death is said to have been the beginning of a long lonesome period of intense searching in his life. It was during his time in the Montessori that he had his first experience with religious houses. As he later wrote of the abandoned abbeys he found as a small child while wandering the countryside:

There were many ruined monasteries in those mountains. My mind goes back with great reverence to the thought of those clean and ancient stone cloisters. Those low and mighty rounded stone arches set in place by monks who perhaps prayed me where I am. Is it any wonder that I should have a friendly feeling about those places? (Seven Story Mountain)

This experience stayed with the young Thomas Merton and he reflected on it often. As he believes that this experience affected him, he also wrote how every experience of every man’s life continues to affect him. Merton states and his life exemplifies that old Chinese proverb that “It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.” Merton lit a lot of candles. His own reflections on this are echoed in New Seeds of Contemplation.

Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because men are prepared to receive them: for such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere except in the good soil of freedom, spontaneity and love. (14)

He was in attendance at Oakum in England when his father Owen died. This sad moment in Merton’s life did not dull his intellect and search for deeper meaning. While in Oakum he wrote a paper about Gandhi during a time when Gandhi was still considered a dissident in England. In fact one of his classmates, John Barber, stated …”He thought deeply much more deeply then those of us who came from less international back grounds…” Even at a young age, Merton was becoming a man of deep conscience and conviction.

At age eighteen Thomas Merton visited Rome, where he had more “germs” planted in his soul. He writes in the Seven Story Mountain, “It was in Rome that my conception of Christ was formed. It was there that I first saw Him.” Merton was influence by the art of the churches and the frescos of Rome, but he was still young and followed the call of the young in parties and carousing with young women. Merton went to school at Cambridge, where he smoked, drank and was a womanizer. His poor grades and amoral behavior reached a fevered pitch when he got a woman pregnant and his grandfather ordered him home. Then at age twenty in 1935, he enrolled in Columbia where he belonged to a fraternity, frequented speak easies and was considered a popular date. He spent long hours writing novels, essays and reviews. As he admits in the Seven Story Mountain he saw his future as a writer.

Then something began to happen to him. As he writes;

Every week as Sunday came around, I filled with the growing desire to stay in the city and go to some kind of a church…What a revelation it was to find so many ordinary people together in one place more conscious of God than of one another. Not here to show off their hats or clothes but to pray or at least to fulfill a religious obligation, not a human one.

A few months later he had been baptized a Catholic. Two years later he applied to the Franciscan Order, having been accepted he confessed everything about his life and was dismissed. After his dismissal from the Franciscans he started teaching at St. Bonaventure’s College.

During his time at St. Bonaventure’s, he took a retreat at the Cistercian of the Strict Observance of the Rule of St. Benedict (generally referred to as Trappist) Monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani. His friend Robert Lax best summed up his reaction, “You could see that it had made a profound effect on him and that he had found something that he really liked.” Shortly there after he applied and was accepted to the Monastery at Gethsemani. He had become the very model of what Benedict referred to when he wrote that, “A monk is someone who wants to be under an Abbot.” He left the chaos of the world to go live in a world that is so committed to peace that “Pax Intrantibus” (Peace Resides Here) carved over its gateway.

Upon entering the monastery, he had given up all aspirations of writing in order to be a simple Trappist monk. Merton writes in his autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain; “Everything makes sense. Everything I wanted to do I can now do all the time without interference. As soon as I got here I knew I was home, where I never have been or would be a stranger.”

Its amazing and surprising that Thomas Merton, now Br. Louis, did not want to write the book that launched him into the worlds view, The Seven Story Mountain. He had to be ordered to do it by his abbot, and as an obedient monk, he was obliged to write it. The Seven Story Mountain sold over 600,000 copies in its first year of publication. And James Laughin publisher for New Directions said that “One days orders was 10 000 copies in a single day.”

Laughin goes on to say:

Seven Story Mountain had something to say that people were, at that moment in our social history, were ready to hear. It presented an answer to spiritual problems that many people, particularly young people that were upset about the way things were going in the country that were upset by the threat of the atomic holocaust and all the rest of it. They wanted to hear that and they liked the way Thomas Merton put it. Once you’ve been bitten by Merton you will go on reading him and read every thing you can. He simply is a remarkable American, writer, thinker, and monk.

However Merton later in his life goes on to say about Seven Story Mountain, “I rebel against it and assert my basic human right not to become a myth for young children in parochial schools.” He did continue to write; in fact he also had a book of poetry published called Thirty Poems. He was very well received as a poet. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a fellow poet and publisher of a literary magazine that published a great deal of Merton’s work said of him, “He was a poet and that is the way the poets that we were publishing identified with him. This was the beginning of the Beat Movement.”

In 1948, after being a monk for eight years, Merton was ordained to the priesthood, a calling he says he felt he was born for. In 1951 he was appointed as Master of Scholastics and continued his writing career. James Laughin, his publisher, states the effect that Merton had on him in a story he relates about his invitation to visit Merton in Gethsemani. He says that despite his up bring to think of monasteries as “places of the devil” he went to visit Merton. To his surprise, he found it to be a “wonderful place full of fun and good feeling. Thomas Merton was very happy.” It was in this way that Thomas Merton influenced the world and world history. He influenced people, proved to them that they could make a difference and they did.

Joan Baez said of him;

He was a rebel, you know a rebel as a church person. I imagine that gives priests and nuns the courage to take steps they wouldn’t other wise take…The traditional western pacifism is let my little light shine and I will do my good within my community in my short life. Radicalizing pacifism means taking it out into the war fronts and to the community and I believe that is what he did when he took a stand and he wrote his poetry.

She, Baez, was deeply influenced by Merton and his poetry and thinking. She took a great many of his ideas and teachings and put them into her songs. Merton, there reached hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people.

Merton’s message was one of peace, a radical kind of peace, a message of detachment, but not of disinterest. The Nicaraguan Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal, who was a novice under Merton, had this to say about him,

It was an incredible privilege to be instructed by this great master of mysticism who had been my instructor for years through his books. I thought I would have to renounce everything when I entered the Trappist monastery my books, my interest in my country, my politics, in the dictatorship of Latin America, Nicaraguan politics, in Semoza, in everything and Merton made me see that I didn’t have to renounce anything.

Cardenal took Merton’s instruction back with him to Nicaragua where he founded a community and became involved in politics and eventually became the Minister of Culture.

W. H. Ferry said

He was appalled by the kind of conversation that were going on in Catholic circles about Just War and the use of the “H” bomb…[He was] a religious mystic who really couldn’t escape the real world and wouldn’t allow his conscience to escape the real world. It must have been a conflict his whole life between retreat and attack in the real world.

Merton made no qualms about matters of social conscience. He said in no uncertain terms, “It is my intention to make my life a rejection a protest against the crimes and injustices of war and tyranny.” There were many who did not care for Merton’s work. In the 1950’s with the killing of the Birmingham children he became involved and outspoken concerning the cause of human liberties. He began to see that race and war and the way of looking at these issues would bring tumultuous change to the face of America. He wrote a text called The Cold War Letters, which was censored by the government, Merton simply published them privately, that is he gave them to friends and they were circulated that way. In fact Merton wrote of American society in these letters,

With the race troubles in the south one can see the beginnings and perhaps more than the beginnings of a Nazi mentality in the United States. There is a powerful and influential alliance of businessmen and government officials who consider everyone who disagrees with them a communist, a traitor and a spy. The atmosphere is not unlike what I remember of the Germany of 1932.

Particularly in the church many did not care for Merton’s work, but he also had his advocates there. Archbishop Jean Jobot, the Vatican Secretary for Non-Christians said about Merton that,

He [was] a kind of prophet, a kind of prophet I think in the future he will be in the history of spirituality, he would more of a man who, I wouldn’t say opened new ways, but rediscovered old ways that we had forgotten.

In 1965 he was the first American Trappist monk to ever be allowed to live in complete seclusion as a hermit.

It was because of this endorsement and recognition of Merton’s influence and his long time involvement in the study of Eastern philosophy and religious life that he was invited to give a talk to the first ever convention of interfaith dialogue between eastern and western monks in Singapore on December 10 1968. This allowed Merton to take a journey that he had long only dreamt of, to go to the East and meet the Dalai Llama.

While in northern India on his way to meet the Dalai Llama, he came to know his guide, Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk who said of Merton, “I was impressed by his capacity of dialogue. I think right in that night he wrote the statement that Nhat Hanh is my brother.” So Merton begins to break down the boundaries of eastern and western monasticism. Merton does get to go on to meet the Dalai Llama, and in his meeting with this man he so impresses the Dalai Llama the he give Merton this endorsement,

I think of a good human being …honest…if you apply different religion, different belief in right way. They all have same aim to turn a good human being better… I think if the man still living today, I think he’d be one of my comrades to do something as men of peace.

From his meeting with the Dalai Llama, he proceeded to Paella Norua in Sri Lanka to visit the great Buddha’s. There he is reported to have had the single greatest experience of his spiritual life. From Sri Lanka he went to his conference in Bangkok. The conference, a major historical event, the first interfaith dialogues between Eastern and Western Monks was held in the Red Cross Conference Center in Singapore on December 10 1968. During this conference he quoted early Marx and commented on the idea that “ you have a basically Christian idea against alienation. At least I believe this is what we have been trying to do in monasteries and I think the only place this can work is in a monastery.” His words were not received with equanimity. He retired to his room for a bath. Later that afternoon he was found electrocuted in his bathtub with and electric fan laying on him. His body was shipped to Gethsemani onboard an Air Force jet with the bodies of U. S. armed forces personnel who had died in Vietnam. He, a man of peace, who was born in times of War, had died during a time of War had traveled with its victims on his last journey.

Thomas Merton, a seemingly unpreposing simpe Trappist Monk did have a profound impact on the American consciousness through his writing and his interpersonal contact with so many others. He helped to shape the mind of several generations of advocates for peace and protesters of war, nuclear holocaust and racism. Thomas Merton was perhaps the greatest spiritual mind of the twentieth century.

Works Cited

Baker, James T, Thomas Merton Social Critic. Lexington, University of Kentucky, 1971

Furlong, Monica, Merton A Biography. San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1980

Malits, Elena, The Solitary Explorer thoms Merton’s Transforming Journey. San

Francisco, Harper and Row, 1980

Merton, Thomas, A Catch of Anti-Letters, Kansas City, Sheed Andrews and McMeel,

1978

- – - . Essential Writings, Maryknoll, Orbis Books, 2000

- – -. Figures for an Apocalypse. Norfolk: New Direction, 1947

- – -. The Hidden Ground of Love. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985

- – - . Honorable Reader. New York, Crossroad, 1989

- – -. The Intimate Merton. New York, Harper Collins, 1999

- – -. Mystics and Zen Masters. New York, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1967

- – -. New Seeds of Contemplation. New York, New Directions, 1961

- – -. No Man Is an Island. San Diego, Harvest Book, 1955

- – -. The Nonviolent Alternative. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971

- – -. On Nuclear Weapons. Chicago, Loyola University Press, 1988

- – -. On Peace. New York, McCall, 1975

- – -. The Road to Joy. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989

- – -. The Secular Journal of Thomas Meront. New York, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy,

1959

- – -. The Seven Storey Mountain. San Diego, Harvest Book, 1999

- – -. The Sign of Jonas. New York, Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1953

- – -. A Thomas Merton Reader. New York, Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961

- – -. Zen and the Birds of Appetite. New York, New Directions Book, 1968

Once in a great while does a man of simplicity and deep thought comes along to silently change and influence the face of culture and the way we look at the greatest issues of our times and the way we look at ourselves. One such man was Thomas Merton, a Trappist Monk from the Monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Bardstown Kentucky. He was a man of peace, who knew intimately the horrors of war.

It has been said War is the major points of historical monument. Perhaps this is so, if so, how ironic is it that a man who dedicated his entire life to peace was born during war and died during a war. Thomas Merton was born on January 31 1915 in the French mountains on the border of Spain. He was born during World War I, “the war to end all wars” and he died on December 10 1968 during the Vietnam War. His father Owen Merton was from New Zealand and mother Ruth was American. Both of Merton’s parents were painters. His mother died when he was six years old and his father when he was 15, of a brain tumor.

Thomas Merton early schooling in France; at age ten he was in a Montessori school in Monteban France. He was reputed to be a lonely and sickly child at this time of his life. His mothers death is said to have been the beginning of a long lonesome period of intense searching in his life. It was during his time in the Montessori that he had his first experience with religious houses. As he later wrote of the abandoned abbeys he found as a small child while wandering the countryside:

There were many ruined monasteries in those mountains. My mind goes back with great reverence to the thought of those clean and ancient stone cloisters. Those low and mighty rounded stone arches set in place by monks who perhaps prayed me where I am. Is it any wonder that I should have a friendly feeling about those places? (Seven Story Mountain)

This experience stayed with the young Thomas Merton and he reflected on it often. As he believes that this experience affected him, he also wrote how every experience of every man’s life continues to affect him. Merton states and his life exemplifies that old Chinese proverb that “It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.” Merton lit a lot of candles. His own reflections on this are echoed in New Seeds of Contemplation.

Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because men are prepared to receive them: for such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere except in the good soil of freedom, spontaneity and love. (14)

He was in attendance at Oakum in England when his father Owen died. This sad moment in Merton’s life did not dull his intellect and search for deeper meaning. While in Oakum he wrote a paper about Gandhi during a time when Gandhi was still considered a dissident in England. In fact one of his classmates, John Barber, stated …”He thought deeply much more deeply then those of us who came from less international back grounds…” Even at a young age, Merton was becoming a man of deep conscience and conviction.

At age eighteen Thomas Merton visited Rome, where he had more “germs” planted in his soul. He writes in the Seven Story Mountain, “It was in Rome that my conception of Christ was formed. It was there that I first saw Him.” Merton was influence by the art of the churches and the frescos of Rome, but he was still young and followed the call of the young in parties and carousing with young women. Merton went to school at Cambridge, where he smoked, drank and was a womanizer. His poor grades and amoral behavior reached a fevered pitch when he got a woman pregnant and his grandfather ordered him home. Then at age twenty in 1935, he enrolled in Columbia where he belonged to a fraternity, frequented speak easies and was considered a popular date. He spent long hours writing novels, essays and reviews. As he admits in the Seven Story Mountain he saw his future as a writer.

Then something began to happen to him. As he writes;

Every week as Sunday came around, I filled with the growing desire to stay in the city and go to some kind of a church…What a revelation it was to find so many ordinary people together in one place more conscious of God than of one another. Not here to show off their hats or clothes but to pray or at least to fulfill a religious obligation, not a human one.

A few months later he had been baptized a Catholic. Two years later he applied to the Franciscan Order, having been accepted he confessed everything about his life and was dismissed. After his dismissal from the Franciscans he started teaching at St. Bonaventure’s College.

During his time at St. Bonaventure’s, he took a retreat at the Cistercian of the Strict Observance of the Rule of St. Benedict (generally referred to as Trappist) Monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani. His friend Robert Lax best summed up his reaction, “You could see that it had made a profound effect on him and that he had found something that he really liked.” Shortly there after he applied and was accepted to the Monastery at Gethsemani. He had become the very model of what Benedict referred to when he wrote that, “A monk is someone who wants to be under an Abbot.” He left the chaos of the world to go live in a world that is so committed to peace that “Pax Intrantibus” (Peace Resides Here) carved over its gateway.

Upon entering the monastery, he had given up all aspirations of writing in order to be a simple Trappist monk. Merton writes in his autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain; “Everything makes sense. Everything I wanted to do I can now do all the time without interference. As soon as I got here I knew I was home, where I never have been or would be a stranger.”

Its amazing and surprising that Thomas Merton, now Br. Louis, did not want to write the book that launched him into the worlds view, The Seven Story Mountain. He had to be ordered to do it by his abbot, and as an obedient monk, he was obliged to write it. The Seven Story Mountain sold over 600,000 copies in its first year of publication. And James Laughin publisher for New Directions said that “One days orders was 10 000 copies in a single day.”

Laughin goes on to say:

Seven Story Mountain had something to say that people were, at that moment in our social history, were ready to hear. It presented an answer to spiritual problems that many people, particularly young people that were upset about the way things were going in the country that were upset by the threat of the atomic holocaust and all the rest of it. They wanted to hear that and they liked the way Thomas Merton put it. Once you’ve been bitten by Merton you will go on reading him and read every thing you can. He simply is a remarkable American, writer, thinker, and monk.

However Merton later in his life goes on to say about Seven Story Mountain, “I rebel against it and assert my basic human right not to become a myth for young children in parochial schools.” He did continue to write; in fact he also had a book of poetry published called Thirty Poems. He was very well received as a poet. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a fellow poet and publisher of a literary magazine that published a great deal of Merton’s work said of him, “He was a poet and that is the way the poets that we were publishing identified with him. This was the beginning of the Beat Movement.”

In 1948, after being a monk for eight years, Merton was ordained to the priesthood, a calling he says he felt he was born for. In 1951 he was appointed as Master of Scholastics and continued his writing career. James Laughin, his publisher, states the effect that Merton had on him in a story he relates about his invitation to visit Merton in Gethsemani. He says that despite his up bring to think of monasteries as “places of the devil” he went to visit Merton. To his surprise, he found it to be a “wonderful place full of fun and good feeling. Thomas Merton was very happy.” It was in this way that Thomas Merton influenced the world and world history. He influenced people, proved to them that they could make a difference and they did.

Joan Baez said of him;

He was a rebel, you know a rebel as a church person. I imagine that gives priests and nuns the courage to take steps they wouldn’t other wise take…The traditional western pacifism is let my little light shine and I will do my good within my community in my short life. Radicalizing pacifism means taking it out into the war fronts and to the community and I believe that is what he did when he took a stand and he wrote his poetry.

She, Baez, was deeply influenced by Merton and his poetry and thinking. She took a great many of his ideas and teachings and put them into her songs. Merton, there reached hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people.

Merton’s message was one of peace, a radical kind of peace, a message of detachment, but not of disinterest. The Nicaraguan Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal, who was a novice under Merton, had this to say about him,

It was an incredible privilege to be instructed by this great master of mysticism who had been my instructor for years through his books. I thought I would have to renounce everything when I entered the Trappist monastery my books, my interest in my country, my politics, in the dictatorship of Latin America, Nicaraguan politics, in Semoza, in everything and Merton made me see that I didn’t have to renounce anything.

Cardenal took Merton’s instruction back with him to Nicaragua where he founded a community and became involved in politics and eventually became the Minister of Culture.

W. H. Ferry said

He was appalled by the kind of conversation that were going on in Catholic circles about Just War and the use of the “H” bomb…[He was] a religious mystic who really couldn’t escape the real world and wouldn’t allow his conscience to escape the real world. It must have been a conflict his whole life between retreat and attack in the real world.

Merton made no qualms about matters of social conscience. He said in no uncertain terms, “It is my intention to make my life a rejection a protest against the crimes and injustices of war and tyranny.” There were many who did not care for Merton’s work. In the 1950’s with the killing of the Birmingham children he became involved and outspoken concerning the cause of human liberties. He began to see that race and war and the way of looking at these issues would bring tumultuous change to the face of America. He wrote a text called The Cold War Letters, which was censored by the government, Merton simply published them privately, that is he gave them to friends and they were circulated that way. In fact Merton wrote of American society in these letters,

With the race troubles in the south one can see the beginnings and perhaps more than the beginnings of a Nazi mentality in the United States. There is a powerful and influential alliance of businessmen and government officials who consider everyone who disagrees with them a communist, a traitor and a spy. The atmosphere is not unlike what I remember of the Germany of 1932.

Particularly in the church many did not care for Merton’s work, but he also had his advocates there. Archbishop Jean Jobot, the Vatican Secretary for Non-Christians said about Merton that,

He [was] a kind of prophet, a kind of prophet I think in the future he will be in the history of spirituality, he would more of a man who, I wouldn’t say opened new ways, but rediscovered old ways that we had forgotten.

In 1965 he was the first American Trappist monk to ever be allowed to live in complete seclusion as a hermit.

It was because of this endorsement and recognition of Merton’s influence and his long time involvement in the study of Eastern philosophy and religious life that he was invited to give a talk to the first ever convention of interfaith dialogue between eastern and western monks in Singapore on December 10 1968. This allowed Merton to take a journey that he had long only dreamt of, to go to the East and meet the Dalai Llama.

While in northern India on his way to meet the Dalai Llama, he came to know his guide, Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk who said of Merton, “I was impressed by his capacity of dialogue. I think right in that night he wrote the statement that Nhat Hanh is my brother.” So Merton begins to break down the boundaries of eastern and western monasticism. Merton does get to go on to meet the Dalai Llama, and in his meeting with this man he so impresses the Dalai Llama the he give Merton this endorsement,

I think of a good human being …honest…if you apply different religion, different belief in right way. They all have same aim to turn a good human being better… I think if the man still living today, I think he’d be one of my comrades to do something as men of peace.

From his meeting with the Dalai Llama, he proceeded to Paella Norua in Sri Lanka to visit the great Buddha’s. There he is reported to have had the single greatest experience of his spiritual life. From Sri Lanka he went to his conference in Bangkok. The conference, a major historical event, the first interfaith dialogues between Eastern and Western Monks was held in the Red Cross Conference Center in Singapore on December 10 1968. During this conference he quoted early Marx and commented on the idea that “ you have a basically Christian idea against alienation. At least I believe this is what we have been trying to do in monasteries and I think the only place this can work is in a monastery.” His words were not received with equanimity. He retired to his room for a bath. Later that afternoon he was found electrocuted in his bathtub with and electric fan laying on him. His body was shipped to Gethsemani onboard an Air Force jet with the bodies of U. S. armed forces personnel who had died in Vietnam. He, a man of peace, who was born in times of War, had died during a time of War had traveled with its victims on his last journey.

Thomas Merton, a seemingly unpreposing simpe Trappist Monk did have a profound impact on the American consciousness through his writing and his interpersonal contact with so many others. He helped to shape the mind of several generations of advocates for peace and protesters of war, nuclear holocaust and racism. Thomas Merton was perhaps the greatest spiritual mind of the twentieth century.

Works Cited

Baker, James T, Thomas Merton Social Critic. Lexington, University of Kentucky, 1971

Furlong, Monica, Merton A Biography. San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1980

Malits, Elena, The Solitary Explorer thoms Merton’s Transforming Journey. San

Francisco, Harper and Row, 1980

Merton, Thomas, A Catch of Anti-Letters, Kansas City, Sheed Andrews and McMeel,

1978

- – - . Essential Writings, Maryknoll, Orbis Books, 2000

- – -. Figures for an Apocalypse. Norfolk: New Direction, 1947

- – -. The Hidden Ground of Love. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985

- – - . Honorable Reader. New York, Crossroad, 1989

- – -. The Intimate Merton. New York, Harper Collins, 1999

- – -. Mystics and Zen Masters. New York, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1967

- – -. New Seeds of Contemplation. New York, New Directions, 1961

- – -. No Man Is an Island. San Diego, Harvest Book, 1955

- – -. The Nonviolent Alternative. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971

- – -. On Nuclear Weapons. Chicago, Loyola University Press, 1988

- – -. On Peace. New York, McCall, 1975

- – -. The Road to Joy. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989

- – -. The Secular Journal of Thomas Meront. New York, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy,

1959

- – -. The Seven Storey Mountain. San Diego, Harvest Book, 1999

- – -. The Sign of Jonas. New York, Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1953

- – -. A Thomas Merton Reader. New York, Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961

- – -. Zen and the Birds of Appetite. New York, New Directions Book, 1968

      My own spirituality is a deeply contemplative and mystical experience. This work is an attempt to spell out my own relationship with the divine, and as an expounding of my relationship with God perhaps it is important to describe the holy ground of the coming together of my human nature and the divine. This meeting place, this personal Xanadu, is my mystical journey into Kairos. I have been asked, once or twice, what my mysticism is like. Well, the heart of mysticism, many mystics would say, is the inability to describe it. That being said, we all try, my attempt comes in the form of a metaphor. It is like this; imagine a large pond or small lake with all the flora, fauna and wildlife these bodies of water typically contain. Consider us human beings as the flora, fauna and life of the pond. Now, think of the point where the surface of the water and the sky meet as being the present moment. The further up into the air, the further into the future and the deeper into the depths of the pond the deeper into the past that one travels. Like most wild life we can only perceive on the plane of our own existence, but he water is crystal clear, any one standing on the shore can see clearly to the bottom. The depth or altitude is our places in time and our location in the pond are our little red dots that read “You are here”. Think of the whole of time and space as being the boundaries of the pond. Now consider the shore. The shore is where God and all things spiritual live, encompassing and enfolding the pond. This is how it is with God and the spiritual world, outside, but encompassing and enfolding. The banks of the pond are Kairos and the pond is Chronos. Sometimes, God likes to go fly fishing, but God is the ultimate catch and release fisher. The mystic is the fish. Just like the fish that is pulled from the real pond, the mystic suffers a severe shock to their system. The mystic is given a fleeting glimpse at the world outside the pond, the “whole picture” if you will, but the mystic, being only a small part of the whole can not comprehend the whole or even clearly remember all that he has seen. Yet the mystic has seen, the mystic does know and understands more then the other creatures of the pond, not by any special merit in him alone, but only by merit of her chance at being caught.

     Mystics, tend I think, to be people of strong self will. When God throws us back we cause ripples in the water. We, and most other extraordinarily strongly willed persons do cause ripples in the image of the pond, change it from what the original image was and can alter the planned ecology of the original system. In short, we cause paradox, we do this by excersing our free will. Any person can, but most don’t, most just go along with the greater mob mentality of the universe. It is only the person of obstinate will that can cause paradox. This paradox, these ripples in the water of reality can be good or bad, depending on how they fit into the divine plan, but often, the plan is ordered and the use of free will doesn’t harm the web of living harmony that God has made.

     A mystic always creates paradox when having a mystical experience but a mystic has three weapons against paradox. The first weapon a mystic has against paradox is secrecy. The fewer who know the bits and pieces the fewer that can act in a way that is contrary to the divine plan. The second weapon a mystic has is free will, or rather a sheer force of will. Here I depart a little from popular Christian mysticism and religious thinking.

Lets talk for a minute about quantum mechanics, specifically “strange behavior at a distance” which was first theorized by Einstein in the 1920′s and later proven, that two subatomic particles of the same substance that are on opposite sides of the galaxy act in concert with each other. If one particle is in a state of quantum uncertainty and is measured, which is to say stopped to see what direction it is spinning the other particle one the other side of the galaxy or the room or the cosmos will stop and spin in the opposite direction, seemingly free of outside influence, but it always happens. So we know, beyond any doubt that there is a very real and direct connectedness between all things in the cosmos. There is a connection. Some quantum mechanics say that on the quantum level all things exist in a state of sometimes matter and sometimes energy, the only deciding factor is measurement of the particle. Einstein believed that the energy that makes up the nature of all things is love. John, in his Gospel tales us in no unequivocal terms, that God is love. Scripture also tells us that God created the heavens and the earth by speaking them into existence; I would say by willing them into existence. If all things are made of love and God is love, then we are all part of what the divine is. We believe that God created us with a spark of his own being in us, and gave us free will and free reign over his creation. Most of the things that we do are the manual impact of putting our will in to action, but Christ said that if you had faith the size of a mustard seed and said to the mountain to uproot and be planted in the sea, it would. What is faith, but focused will? The philosopher William James, in his paper “The Will to Believe” said; “The belief in certain things are enough to bring about those things existence.” So, I believe that sheer force of will can cause real and discernable changes in the world around us. So I would have to say the second weapon a mystic has against paradox is sheer force of will. I believe that if one can will something, or believe in something, or have faith enough in something hard enough, they can make that change in the divine plan. After all, we are taught that God did give us free will, and now we have to consider the ramifications of that statement and what it truly means to use our freewill.

      I believe the third and final weapon against paradox is to become the water, to stop fighting or trying to exert one’s own will and influence and trust in God’s ability to ensure the rightness of her plan. The final weapon of the mystic is to realize that oneness with the divine and to become aware of the greatness of the other’s infinite will and sight as opposed to our finite will and sight. The final weapon a mystic has against paradox is to become the water and the air and the bank, to relax into the web of life and allow the divine to flow through them as God chooses and to trust God’s own good judgment.

     There is another metaphor, less perfect, but perhaps more comprehensable.  Think of the general mystic experience as flipping throught the channels on the TV at a moderately fast rate.  One only catches glimpses, and must from those glimpses deduce logically and intuit spiritually their meaning.  Ergo, this can be a very confusing and oftentime very frustrating proposition.  Hence the mystical double talk and incomprehensable responses and the mystics own frustration at their “gift”.

     “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it (John 1:1-5).” In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was God. In the beginning was Being and that Being is God. All things were created through Being, but were created empty and void. Being went forth to fill the creation, to make man. Man has no Being. The light of man is Being. Man is empty and void, is nothing. Being does not reside outside of man, as another to be attained, but is man. Being does not act through man, but acts through itself in man. Being is Consciousness, man is self-conscious, man Becomes when he lets go of self-consciousness and embraces Consciousness. Man becomes Being, becomes God, in allowing God to fill his emptiness and to Be through his nothingness.
We are not; we simply are conduits for Being. I have said nothing new or revolutionary, although many will think so, rather I reassert that we are one with God, with Being and Consciousness, and we only get in our own ways of that oneness. We place our egotistical selves in the path. We stop becoming and alienate ourselves from Being. Perfection, the path is Being, Heaven is not a place, but Being. That is the secret. Everyone is concerned with getting to a place, or doing the right things. That is a fallacy. Being is our destiny and our perfection. It is in our grasps and our essence, but we try to make it fit our definitions and concepts, it won’t it is Being.
Many would ask, “but what is the nature of this Being or Consciousness?” The answer is that there is no answer, except to say that; “God is love”. Yet, even with this insight into the Being of the Divine, there are those who will say this love or that love is bad, is evil. Evil is that absence of good; it is not Being. Being is love, how can any love not be good, if love is Being? William Butler Yeats said that, “But Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement; (ln 15 – 16).” While trying to be sarcastic, Yeats hit upon the secret of human existence. Being, God has built God’s mansion in the place of excrement, in humanity. In building God’s mansion in this place of excrement, God transforms that waste into God’s own Being.
The act of Becoming is the ultimate act of love, the total empting of the sense of self, to truly empty, a waiting receptacle, so as to be filled up by God. When we let go of our conceptions and myopic vision, we see things through God’s knowing and we enter into God’s understanding. Many call this a mystical journey or ascetic way of life and it is, I suppose, but more then that, it repairs our marred self-image “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…. Then God said, ‘Let us create man in our own image.’” We do not believe that God has a physical body, God is fundamentally spirit, so then what does this mean that God created us in God’s own image? That God imprinted on our souls God’s own very essence. We, through life, mar and putrefy this essence, but it is still there. It is covered over by who we think we are and become, but God is still there. We have to cast off this self-image and ego to cleanse the image, the essence of God and become who God made us to be, one with God’s self.
To be “in love with God” or to be “lovers with God” is not enough, not by far, because it still makes God the other focus of a sense of self and not the center of one’s emptiness. We must accept that we are “the place of excrement”. It is my very emptiness, and my very unworthiness that allows God to be through me. I become, by being empty, an open conduit, an empty cup, waiting to be filled up and that is just what the Divine does, fills us up with Itself and makes us who we truly are. We are created and recreated in God to be creatures of love, to be God on earth. Yet, we cannot do this until we let go and allow love (i.e. God) to flow through us.
We all tend to think, thanks to Rene Descartes’; in terms of ourselves as center of our universe and all things have meaning and relevance only as measured by how they pertain to us. “I think therefore I am” makes us egocentric. Being egocentric, all other things become outside and the other. God does too. For us there is the self-consciousness and the consciousness of God. We believe they are two distinct and separate things. This belief is a lie. There is only one consciousness that is the consciousness of divinity itself. We are not separate things; we are one thing. Our egotistical self gets in the way of our seeing our oneness with God. We are not a separate thing from God from Consciousness; rather we are one with it. We are nothing before God’s self-awareness, consciousness, love fills us up, and we are only empty vessels. We can do no good of our own; it is God acting through God’s self in us that does any good. We do evil when we fall under the lie of self-consciousness and get in our own way (Merton 22-5).
Yet, mark that my accretions are only that we are one with God, that being created in God’s image and likeness means unequivocally that our souls are mirrors to reflect God’s own Being into the world in which we live. The Catholic Church teaches in no uncertain terms that if we want to know what it means to be human we must look to the person of Jesus Christ and just as assuredly the Church also teaches that to understand everything that God wants to reveal about God’s own self we must look to Jesus Christ. Too many people present these two statements as separate truths, but they are not, they are one truth the Truth of Who Christ is and who we are called to be. These two truths are opposing sides to the same coin, one cannot exist without the other, but too many believers do try to divide them from each other.
Yet, our Church teaches us that in all of Her statements about what it is to be human and to be Christian, that we are the very image of God and (the body of) God on earth. Mystics and doctors of the Church teach that if we truly knew how much God was in each person we would genuflect every time we met some one. By article of faith this is what we are supposed to believe, but we tend to be very parsimonious in its practice. What was it that was written? “It is by your deeds that you shall be known.” We ascribe to believe in the very sanctity and divinity of human existence “from the womb to the tomb” but we bend over backwards to not pay respect and reverence to our fellow human beings right in front of us. The book of Revelations tells us that God will judge us in how we have dealt with our brothers and sisters, because “When you have failed to do thus for the least of my brethren, you have failed to do so for me.” There are so many hidden truths in so direct words, like our oneness with Christ in our human condition and through him our oneness with God in divinity. Yet we usually chose to turn our backs on this divinity and our fellow brothers and sisters. Our “modern age” is a consequence of this very turning away from community and to emptiness. Natsume Soseki wrote in Kokoro, “You see loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern age, so full of freedom, independence and our own egotistical selves.” What Soseki-san is getting at is the cost of turning our backs on the divine in our selves and thusly in the divine in our brothers and sisters, we seek freedom and find frivolousness, seek independence and find emptiness and seek our egotistical selves and find loneliness, a loneliness that is not just a absence from other humans truly and deeply touching our lives, but in this absence, we find an absence of God touching our lives. When we become our egotistical, Cartesian selves we become closed and locked boxes keeping God out.
What is our egotistical self? Pride. Many theologians, myself included believe that pride was the original sin which tainted and marred our image of God and our relationship with God, the very sin that caused death to enter the world. St Paul tells us in no uncertain terms that; “The wages of sin are death.” So then to be centered in the self is a pride filled way of being and not being who God created us to be. We pave the way for our own death, and much more then the death of the body, but death of the soul, by not surrendering our sense of self and accepting that we are nothing but reflections of God in the world. We embrace death by clinging to our egotistical selves. Perhaps this is what Christ meant when he said; “Those who lose their life for my sake shall have eternal life.” It is not until we are willing to stop being who we think we are and willing to be who we are called to be; God alive in the world, that we will realize our nothingness and embrace our everythingness in embracing our oneness with the Divine. Above all we must remember that we are one with Christ and in Christ we are one with God. Christ himself says as much in the Gospel according to John; “. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father and you are in me and I in you.” It is our oneness in Christ who is our very God and therefore our oneness with God that we find fulfillment and completion. It is casting off the sin of pride and the sin of being egotistical enough that we think we are the center of our own universe and embrace our true being, our oneness with God, that we will find Shakespeare’s “The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn / No traveler returns, puzzles the will, (3:1:78 – 9)”. We will find our own perfection and our own fulfillment by being God and letting God flow through us to prefect and make whole all of God’s creation the puzzle of death we become meaningless. It is important to see in the human form exactly what Hamlet sees:
. . . What [a] piece of work is
a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in
form and moving, how express and admirable in action,
how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god! the
beauty of the world; the paragon of animals; and yet to me
what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me –
nor woman neither. . . . (2:2:297 – 303)
We as living breathing human beings are the pinnacle of God’s creative endeavor, but we are only “quintessence of dust” even given that. It is not till we can release our self and embrace the wonders of what God is in us that we can see the Truth.
My own journey down the mystical path of entering into God was when I first fell in love with God, when God and I became lovers. God became less distant and more real. The more love I gave my lover the more love I had to give. This is very much like our first childhood sweetheart. Tim O’Brien writes about his first love in The Things They Carried which I hope will take us all back to our first love so we can know the first steps on the path to God.
Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones – that kind of love…. For me, though, it was very special. Down inside I had important things to tell her, big profound things, but I couldn’t make any words come out. I had trouble breathing. Now and then I’d glance over at her, thinking how beautiful she was…. I wanted to find some way to let her know how I felt, a compliment of some sort, but all I could manage was a stupid comment…. and both of us were very careful to avoid the awkwardness of eye contact. Which was how we knew about being in love. It was pure knowing. Neither of us, I suppose, would’ve thought to use that word, love but by the fact of not looking at each other, and not talking, we understood with a clarity beyond language that we were sharing something huge and permanent… (228 – 30)
It is this awkward, unknowing but complete assurance type of love of which I speak when I talk about my first falling in love with God. Also I chose this particular expression of first love because I believe it strikes very close to the heart of what Christ meant in saying; “Amen, I say to you. Whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it. (Mk 10:15).”
As God and I moved deeper into our love relationship, God stopped being that image of fright to terrify you into doing to right thing for fear of damnation. God became much more then a lover, God became my friend. I often would relax myself and allow myself to drift into the bosom of my friend and I soon discovered that the more I was with God the more I was becoming a willing tool, then I took that final leap from being a tool, a separate thing to being a drop of water in an infinite ocean of God, poured out to water God’s own good garden.
I, by no means, became God, but rather I discovered the God who resides in my very being, a God who made me with a spark of her own Being. I was finally able to find myself, but only by losing my self to that spark and that spark became the happy funeral pyre of my egotistical-self, from which my new being, my Oneness with my friend rose like the mythical Phoenix from its own ashes. I became the realization of Miester Eckhardt’s two-part prayer that had so confused me for so long. “I pray thee God, rid me of God.” and “God and I are one.”
Like Eckhardt, I had just to strip myself of the external visages of a God lost in ritual and other people’s expectations. I had to find my friend, I had to find myself and I found both in the same place. I am the image of the Risen Christ, and I am His hands and words in a hurting world today. I am a conduit for God to reach out and touch his hurt and wounded people. But then so are you. It is crucial to be rid of our sense of self in order to embrace ourselves, our God who loved us so much that he created us with a spark of her own self in us; a spark that we must fan into a bonfire of love and goodwill.
There is another reason I chose O’Brien’s story. Later in his book he says; “And as a writer now, I want to save Linda’s life. Not her body – her life (236).’ In much the same way through my writing I hope to save the lives of all those sparks, all those people who are lost and looking, who are hurt and seek healing, who are weak and want strength and who are lonely and want to be loved.