Reflecting and Responding
Thomas Merton
Finding Our Home with God
Look at your own life. Perhaps the Book of Life, in the end, is the book one has lived. If one has lived nothing, one is not in the Book of Life.
THE INTIMATE MERTON
THE ESSENCE OF THOMAS MERTON’S approach to our life with God is captured in his earliest work, The Seven Storey Mountain, and in his favorite multivolume work, The Journals, where we see his intelligence, wit and charm roam across a vast sea of events, experiences and people. The Seven Storey Mountain is a beautiful and troubling vision of our longing for God. Intermingled with Merton’s deep and probing insights is a description of the tragic loss of virtually every significant adult member of his immediate and extended family. It is a chronicle of the utter annihilation of our earliest and most prominent community—the family.
But Merton’s story is also a glorious portrayal of our life in Christ that leads to our participation in God’s greatest community—the church. Here Merton finds the love, comfort, nurture and support from which his vital creative energy springs. Ultimately, Merton is captivated by God’s relentless love for the world. It is soothing in its message and powerful in its effect, propelling Merton to a life of service and sacrifice that captivated an entire generation.
It would be easy to categorize Merton as a conventional thinker in the tradition of action and contemplation, for he spends a great deal of time on the progression one must undergo from action to contemplation to active contemplation. But to categorize Merton as a single type is to miss the dynamic interplay that continued right up until his untimely death.
Merton was born in 1915 to a New Zealander father and an American mother. His childhood and youth were spent shuttling between America, Europe and various outposts of the former British Empire. His overwhelming impulse was to determine how we can spend our life overcoming the sin and mortification that rack every human being. In The Seven Storey Mountain, he identifies the nine issues with which each one of us must wrestle—life, death, time, love, sorrow, fear, wisdom, suffering and eternity—then uses Dante’s image of the multiple levels of purgatory we must overcome if we are to discover a pure relationship with God.
The entire book tells the captivating tale of one man’s journey to God. But its timeless appeal is in Merton’s passionate desire that each one of us develop a deeper desire to know and love God. Along the way we meet Merton’s companions on the journey, including his close personal friends, his various academic interests and especially the books that had a formative and lingering effect on him.
Merton describes his interest in keeping a journal as simply the desire to write a book into which everything of his life might go. His sensitive treatment of his friends draws us into reflecting on our own friendships. His vast travels take us to exotic ports around the world. The images of the places he has visited and the people who inhabit them permanently mark him. His writings reflect an ongoing quest to find “patterns of experience” that connect us to God. His very life reflects one of the most robust engagements with God in all spiritual literature.
Merton’s Expression of the Seven Paths
Merton’s approach to the spiritual life easily covers all seven paths of Christian devotion. His somber reflection on his past sexual transgressions reminds us of Augustine. He knows the ordering power of God’s love because he has known the disordering power of his own unbridled lust. Reflecting on the nature of love, Merton muses, “It is only love that gives us life, and without God’s love we would cease to be.” Elsewhere he emphasizes how critical it is that we give everything to God: “There is only one thing to live for: to love God. And only one unhappiness: not to love God.” Ultimately his own inability to experience human intimacy awakens him to the need to find our ultimate intimacy in God. Toward the end of his shortened life he begins to order his loves properly, seeing the connection between the human longing for intimacy and our need to understand the wisdom of God.
The entire landscape of Merton’s writing depicts the spiritual life as journey. One highlight is his entry on what to do when we have begun the spiritual life and have not reached an answer for our dilemma. Here is his response: “We are often confronted by questions that we cannot answer because the time for answering them has not yet come.” Merton recognizes the silence that we experience between the time when we enter the spiritual life and God’s ultimate response at the end of our journey.
Elsewhere, Merton defends both the insights of his earlier writings and the reality that he has migrated beyond them. When challenged about the validity of some of the positions he had embraced earlier in works such as The Seven Storey Mountain, for example, he simply states, “The things I have said fairly well are things I needed to say: I stand by them.” Inevitably, his experiences in life help him realize that we must trust even when we don’t understand.
The people who influenced Merton the most were his friends, both personal and literary. His literary friends were too numerous to count but included Augustine, St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, the English mystics, Etienne Gilson, Aldous Huxley and many more. From his early days in France and England to his student days at Columbia and Cuba to his final trip to the Far East we see a man with an insatiable appetite for life. Every encounter is an opening to a deeper experience of life and every authentic experience of life is a deeper encounter with God. These travels become the cauldron for the pivotal experiences that change him.
Merton’s evolving interest in nonviolence resulted from his engagement with the world. He migrated beyond the cloistered exclusivity of Roman Catholicism as a result of his encounter with the East. He recognized that the great questions of life open us to a higher and more illuminated understanding of the meaning and purpose of life. His intellectual curiosity and insatiable appetite to find patterns of meaning amidst seemingly arbitrary experiences guided every encounter and every conversation.
Merton’s most explicit treatment of the spiritual life as journey is found in one of his final works, an essay titled “From Pilgrimage to Crusade.” The work itself is a beautiful and poignant historical treatment, but it moves beyond history to invite us into a reflection on our own personal journey. The Celtic innovations and the Irish nuances show a progressively deeper interior exploration of the spiritual life as journey and also invite us to see how our own external experiences open us to a deeper life with God.
Merton’s works roam across vast amounts of spiritual literature, crafting a synthesis as unique as it is compelling. He addresses the role and importance of religious experiences. He searches far and wide to recover our knowledge of God lost in the Fall. He dedicates an entire work to the imitation of Christ. His journey to the East inspires a whole new dimension of divine ascent. Even the otherworldly theme of contemplation is tempered by his emphasis on daily work.
Merton ended his life pursuing an understanding of the similarities and differences between Eastern religions and the Christian faith. He was especially interested in the contrast and interplay of action and contemplation. Here is one example: “The spiritual life is not a life of quiet withdrawal, a hothouse growth of artificial ascetic practices beyond the reach of people living ordinary lives. It is in the ordinary duties and labors of life that can and should develop our spiritual union with God.”
Perpetual Quest
When we recognize Merton’s love of literature, his attention to great literary and spiritual figures and even his debt to Dante, we begin to understand his great commitment to the spiritual life as journey. We do not remain the same. We are always moving. Merton’s own spiritual and intellectual journey demonstrates a soul on the move. As he explored the knowledge and literature that energized him, a specific direction unfolded. There was purpose and intent to all his activities and to all of our activities as well. There is also an ultimate outcome for our journey when we experience an eternity with God.
In all, Merton wrote thirty-five books, each one designed to introduce us to a new resource or enhanced perspective that takes us deeper in our life with God. In addition, hundreds of other books have been written about his life and thought. Ultimately, Merton stands as one of the greatest twentieth-century embodiments of the spiritual life as journey. His life is a testimony to the power of God’s love and grace to restore a damaged, misplaced soul to his eternal kingdom.
REFLECTING AND RESPONDING
On December 10, 1941, Thomas Merton, age twenty-six, stood outside the gates of the Abbey of Gethsemane in Kentucky and asked to enter. On December 10, 1968, twenty-seven years later to the day, he died tragically in Thailand. Merton was in Bangkok to address monks and theologians, and he spoke of the monastic vow of conversation morum, “conversion of life.” It was, he said, the most essential of the vows, and the most mysterious. It meant a commitment to total inner transformation, a commitment to become a completely new person, a continuing pattern of death and new life.
Those words now have a prophetic echo to them, for Merton retired to his room to take a shower and was accidentally electrocuted by a faulty fan. As Merton was making his way out of the lecture hall he was asked about the need to convert people to Christ. Merton’s reply gives us his last words: “What we are asked to do at present is not so much to speak of Christ as to let Him live in us so that people may find Him by feeling how He lives in us.”
Merton’s first and most famous book, The Seven Storey Mountain, is a literary and spiritual tour de force. It is autobiography strikingly in the tradition of Augustine’s Confessions. Indeed, it is the closest piece of writing I can think of to the Confessions, some of the phrases equaling that of the famous bishop of Hippo. Consider, for example, Merton’s description of his impressions at age ten of the medieval city of St. Antonin in southern France, where the labyrinth of narrow streets all converge on the church so that its steeple dominates everything:
Here . . . the very pattern of the place, of the houses and streets and of nature itself, the circling hills, the cliffs and trees, all focused my attention upon the one, important, central fact of the church and what it contained. Here, everywhere I went, I was forced, by the disposition of everything around me, to be always at least virtually conscious of the church. . . . The whole landscape, unified by the church and its heavenward spire, seemed to say: This is the meaning of all created things: we have been made for no other purpose than that men may use us in raising themselves to God, and in proclaiming the glory of God. . . . Oh, what a thing it is, to live in a place that is so constructed that you are forced, in spite of yourself, to be at least a virtual contemplative!
It is, of course, an endlessly interesting and twisted journey before Merton himself is transformed from being “a virtual contemplative” to becoming an actual contemplative, a journey I must not spoil for you if you have not read the story for yourself. Suffice it to say that with The Seven Story Mountain Merton gives us a stunning piece of spiritual autobiography, perhaps the best of the twentieth century. He concludes with the Latin Sit finis libri, not finis quaerendi, roughly translated as, “This may be the end of the book, but it is not the end of the searching.”
To be sure, searching was a hallmark of Merton’s life. By the time of the tragedy in Bangkok, he had become one of the twentieth century’s most articulate and thoughtful writers on the spiritual life. Searching, always searching. He quotes with appreciation the perceptive words of P. T. Forsythe that “prayer is to religion what original research is to science.” Merton most certainly did “original research” both in his praying and in his writing. Indeed, his writing was an extension of his praying. He wrote books, articles and poems. He wrote about meditation, about literature, about war and peace. Praying and writing. Esther de Waal observes, “Prayer was essential for this was the way [Merton] could know God most fully. He was a writer because this was the way he could express himself most fully.”
Dear Lord Jesus Christ, we may have a hard time praying like Merton did, and certainly we cannot write like him. Yet, here we are . . . just as we are. And today we dare to believe that you receive us just the way we are. O Lord, please accept our stumbling efforts to pray. Words do not come quickly or easily for us. We’re so glad you see past our words and into our hearts. We really do want our hearts to be pleasing to you. May the mute language of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.