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Merton Notes

Thomas Merton: Spiritual Master

Class I

Thomas Merton: "perhaps the most significant Christian figure in 20^th century America."  David Tracy

"I rank Merton with the Fathers of the early Church and the Middle Ages" in regard to his Christianization of culture.  Dom Jean Leclercq, OSB

Thomas Merton was the most famous and well-read monk who ever lived.  He was a spiritual giant because he expressed modern religious longing better and more authentically than any other writer of the 20^th century.

What do you know about Thomas Merton?

-         Spend a moment writing

-         Writing as hermeneutic and as praxis for this course, as we study a writer who came to spiritual awakening through writing and became a spiritual master through his writing.

This moment in human spiritual evolution

-         an axial age of transition, transformation

-         tracing the growth of human spirit life

-         animism and the soul of the world

-         classical spiritualities and the soul of the self

-         the constrictions of religion and the renaissance and revolution of reason

-         the Enlightenment and the new repressions of reason

-         the refocus of human concern from heaven to earth, eternity to temporality

-         the hegemony of reason, science and the technological culture

-         the climax of materialism and modernity

-         the rebirth of wonder at the edge of science

-         the catastrophes of the 20^th century

-         the loss of soul and the dislocations, alienations of such disorientation

-         the new moment of spiritual revival

-         the pioneers and orienteers of a new way

Thomas Merton as Spiritual Master

-         What is a spiritual master?

A master is someone who has proficiency or mastery in some area of human experience or knowledge.  Someone whose knowledge has deepened into wisdom and therefore can teach others.

WISDOM Person: who possesses a deep and insightful understanding of reality, its meaning, depths, source and orientation.  One who understands what life is all about and can communicate that to others

One who knows the way; who has the medicine to heal the soul of its woundedness; an orienteer on life's journey.  One who has learned the spiritual with such experiential exactitude that he or she is able to guide others on that path and serve as exemplar or paradigm for those committed to its journey (Cunningham, TM:SM p. 48)

The need for spiritual masters: each tradition tries to articulate its own insight or wisdom about the mystery of life and in every tradition there are those who guide others.  In sacred societies these people have prominence and are available to the community.  They connect people to a life that is larger than their own, relating them to the cosmic, and ultimately the divine dimensions of our existence.   In secular societies these people are harder to come by and there are fewer ways to access them and avail oneself of the transmission of their wisdom.

Theses people are not the ones who have the intellectual knowledge concerning the mysteries of life, but have EXPERIENTIAL knowing.  They understand the potentials of human life and they understand how these potentials for the fullness of life get thwarted.  They understand the obstacles, hazards and dangers that confront every human person on their life's journey.  They understand the stages and phases of the process of human transformation.

Thomas Merton was such a person and it is his PERSON that becomes the revelatory wisdom to be explored.

-         Thomas Merton as paradigmatic person:

-         the modern/postmodern

-         the American

-         the "New Age" seeker

-         the spiritual pioneer

-         the prophet

-         the "catholic"

-         the artist

-         the writer

-         the poet

-         the convert

-         the monk

-         the critic

-         the intellectual

-         the theologian

-         the mystic

-         the vexed

-         the orphan

-         the alien

-         the visionary

-         the universalist

-         the urbane

-         the "beat"

-         the marginal man

-         the revolutionary

-         the mentor

-         the ecumenist

-         the pre and post-Vatican II Catholic

-         the neurotic

-         the lover

-         the not-saint

-         the spiritual giant

Merton's gift was that he mirrored the soul of the age.  He was the embodiment of the modern spiritual seeker, and his life was WRITTEN boldly and comprehensively so that a generation, many generations could read it.

In his quest for spiritual life he recovered the deep sources of the Christian tradition - its deep contemplative or mystical roots.  He recovered the most vital and dynamic elements and orientations of Christianity and effectively communicated them to the 20^th century world. 

Merton was above all a monk: one whose whole life is organized around the God-quest.  He was driven by the monastic archetype that formed his soul and he awakened the monastic archetype in his readers.  In effect, he inspired and animated a virtual and anonymous monastic community through his books.

Merton was an autoBIOGRAPHER:  one who recorded his own intimate struggles with life, mystery, God, self, the world at each stage of his personal journey.  He did this in a distinctly American and modern way.

Contemporary situation of 20^th Century persons:

Secularism

Skepticism

Atheism or agnosticism

Existentialism

Nihilism

The eclipse of God and the monstrosity of humanity

Materialism

Violence

Alienation

Addiction

Merton shared these qualifiers with modern people and suffered their deadening effects of soul.  He understood by experience the alienation and soul-death modern man and women confront as the structures and values of the modern world cut them off from themselves and God.  In the face of these realities Merton claimed that the crisis and challenge of the modern human person was to recover the depths of the true self, and an authentic humanism.

How the modern person was to come to this sense of recovery and healing and sanity was the quest of Merton's whole life.

Why so compelling?  A PERSON AND A STORY

A person who could embody and dramatize the spiritual quest for soul-recovery and a story that could mirror our own.

A Paradigmatic Story / an archetypal story of conversion and redemption and transformation.  A story that could mirror or own particular stories of the spiritual quest.

Narrative Theology: getting to God-talk through self-talk

Spiritual Autobiography is a self-witnessing process of revelation.  Of God revealing to ME concretely, existentially, to myself.  Spiritual autobiography opens me to  MY salvation history story.

The Judeo-Christian tradition is a story tradition.  There is a narrative about a relationship between God (the Other) and the human person / the human community.

There is a relationship possible between the divine and human persons because the Jewish and Christian imaginations intuit a god-likeness in the human.

IMAGO DEI: the notion of the "image of God" is the theological insight that underpins the Christian vision of life.  At our deepest core and source the human person is the creative expression of the divine person who has expressed the divine self in the human person.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition this is the fundamental understanding that underpins the whole revelation of the divine person to human persons.

Genesis: In the beginning God…

The creation of the human is the climax and culmination of the creative process wherein the divine person expresses the divine SELF in a creature who has the capacity to relate to and communicate with and live in communion with the divine mystery.  This creature has the nature to receive the divine imprint on itself.  The true nature and true self of the human person is this divine image and likeness.  And the whole story of the Jewish and Christian scripture is about how the human person / community comes either to REALIZE or to FORGET this identity.

The great question posed by God to human persons in the Book of Genesis is: "Adam and Eve, where are you."

The great cover-up, masks and disguises

It becomes a STORY.  It becomes THE STORY.

In the Christian tradition especially this story is told in the life and experience of Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus is the human person par excellence who is struggling to realize and celebrate – to BE and to DO – his divine identity.  To realize his God=likeness.

The Jesus Story is of a person coming to know himself before God, with God, in God, as God.  For this reason we celebrate Jesus as "true God, true man."  For Christians , Jesus is the one in whom we see human nature in its deepest truth and reality: as the image of God.

The story of Jesus is told in at least four ways in the Gospels – each a unique portrait of a human person being transformed into a divine person.  In each Jesus is laboring to discover and be his true self.

Jesus' passion and process becomes the "Greatest Story Ever Told" of one man who gave himself to the work of transformation so that in him his friends and disciples would say that they saw God.  To see him , to know him was to see and know what God was like, and what the human person was like in our deepest identity and meaning.

What is the true nature of the human person?  What is our true identity?  It is compassion and love.  It is courage and generosity.  It is self-sacrifice and communion with all living beings and the source of all BEING.

The great spiritual question, then is: how do we realize our true nature and what prevents us from doing so?  From being so?

How do humans loose their true self?  How do we become alienated and lost from our true home, our true nature? 

According to Merton we become dis-tracted, we become scattered and squandered in the external world of unlikeness and confusion.  Subjectivity and interiority.   We drift from our deep moorings in the source of life.  We become lost and confused and anxious and afraid of life itself because we have no guidance and no safe pathways that we can easily find.  Therefore we wander in a "region of unlikeness" and become more and more alienated from our true self.  We cultivate a false self, a defensive ego that passes for the true self but is not.  It is a fiction and an impostor.  To be trapped in this false self is a source of extreme suffering. 

Merton tried to address the modern person's incapacity for God which brought with it an internal deadness.  He understood his mission to be to help "restore man to a state of fitness for God" by the recovery of his or her soul.

Merton's words describing Blake can be used of him.  He was a prophet, that is "one who 'utters' and 'announces' news about man's own deepest trouble – news that emerges from the very ground of that trouble in man himself."  The prophet is a "witness" to our human situation in relation to God and our true selves.  He or she is a sign of God in the world of persons.

Remember that Merton understood deep spiritual anguish in his own life and suffered the wound of alienation profoundly.  He was a homeless, abandoned, rootless, wounded child orphaned at six by his mother, and 16 by his father.  His only brother died when he was in his 20s.

But Merton is an evangelist – a bearer of good news - as well as a prophet announcing our deepest trouble.  As an evangelist, Merton tells us that there is a way out of our confusion and distress.  He proclaims a gospel of transformation, promising that there is a way to healing and salvation, there is a way to liberation.

The Return to Paradise

The only way out is the process of conversion –(conversio morem) of turning around from one's false ways of being inhuman to one's true humanity.  Merton claimed that the crisis and challenge of the modern person is to recover the depths of the true self as the point of access or horizon of proximity to God.  If we cannot recover our true being in God, we cannot be authentically human and shall never know the peace and joy for which we were born.

The THEMES that underwrite Merton's understanding of the conversion process:

God:  The starting point: there is a Graciousness or Presence - mysterious, ineffable, and free – at the heart and source of existence.  Being – Merton's name for God – is for us, on our side.  Although Merton grows in God-consciousness as he matures, he never surrenders his intuition that the ultimate mystery in which we live and move and have our being, is benign, merciful, and self-implicated in each and every particular life that it generates.

 Self:  The axiomatic referent to the mystery of God is the mystery of the human person, God's image and likeness.  The deepest potential of the human person is to reflect the nature of the divine person to the degree that our creaturehood permits.  The human is a creature to be illumined by God and transformed by opening to the energy of divinity.  Yet there is a mysterious existential condition of alienation from God that pervades human experience, which is felt to be a problematic state of exile from God.  This state of exile from unity with God is the human person's deepest suffering personally, and the cause of humanity's suffering corporately.

This state of estrangement is at once the cause and effect of "growing strange" to ourselves and to God, of God and self "growing strange" to us.  This is a paradoxical and mysterious state of affairs which is the universal condition of the human race.  Because we do not have a spontaneous sense of our true selves – or grow strange to ourselves as we age – we construct a mask to wear into the world.  We generate a "shadow self" that is a fabrication of being.  It is not our true self and on some level we know it.  We know we are faking, and this makes us very insecure.  Yet we do everything to keep this shadow self, false self alive.  We promote it, we defend it, we inflate it, we cling to it.  It becomes more central and immediate to us than God.  It becomes an idol.

The challenge of a human life is to let this mask dissolve, let this shadow self come into the light.  We must return to the ground of our being, to struggle to re-center our true self in God and recover the core self beyond the disordered psychological needs and states that passes for our human nature.

Contemplation:  The problematic state of human existence just described requires healing which is what is meant by "salvation."  From Merton's perspective as a Christian what is required is a therapy that would aid the human person in their soul-recovery.  The therapy is actually grace, which is a way of speaking about divine energy with its radiant and healing power.  As one might immerse oneself in water or sunlight for therapeutic reasons, one can also be immersed in a field of divine energy which has the power to heal and restore and vivify and re-create the distorted human nature. 

A process of recovery of inner self.

All spiritual cultures have "healing centers" for the soul.  In most traditions these are environments where the person elects to be open to a therapeutic process that is meant to recover the soul.  In many traditions these environments are monastic communities where one submits to a process of transformation meant to relax the contraction and disfiguring grasp of the afflictive habits of our nature crystallized in the compulsive ego.  One takes up a program of ego-diminishment for the sake of soul-life.

There are many features to such a program but at its core is the practice of contemplation or contemplative prayer.  This practice is taken up at least initially in an environment and in conditions which foster its development.  For Merton, as for most monastics, these conditions were silence and solitude.  Since the person has been lost in a chaos of distraction, noise, and a squandering activism, there is an need to withdraw to some degree from the noise and superficiality in which we loose ourselves and stay asleep to our deeper nature. 

Contemplation for Merton is a "mind awake in the dark" which is learning to enlarge its capacity for God by silencing the internal noise, and stilling ourselves so that we can "rest in God" and receive the therapy of grace or divine energy, much like a transfusion of being.  In the practice of contemplation or contemplative prayer the soul begins its journey home to its true source in what Merton calls the "delicate sinking of the true self into God."  In the depth of this kind of prayer a person encounters the energy of God working a gentle and subtle reversal of values.  In this kind of prayer, one experiences a mysterious loosening of the knots of ego that had us bound to our own brand of suffering.

The Way of Emptiness and Darkness:  There are many routes to God because God is a mystery of differentiation. The Christian tradition celebrates God as a trinity of persons.  There is a way that the divine mystery is seen in its creation and in the forms of its own expressiveness, particularly the human person, who is oriented to this mystery.  This dimension of God is celebrated in the person of Jesus Christ who is the human face of God and the divine earthling, the cosmic child.

There is also a way that the divine pervades all things, and our own inner life.  There is a sense of "presence", and "flow" in this dimension of being, as if some conscious energy were "breathing" us.  We call this dimension of the divine the Holy Spirit, and in its élan it imparts a variety of qualities which are joy, peace, fortitude, gentleness, creativity, compassion, wisdom, etc.

Merton was very drawn to this dimension of God because one can only be "unknowing" here, attending, humble.  Here one can only be empty of all ideas about God or self, be detached from one's ego, and let it recede so that one can make space for the greater presence. 

This is apophatic mysticism – a "let-go" way, a path of darkness and unknowing.  This way forces us below the surface comforts of basic narcissism to face the hell that existence becomes when we are trapped in our selves and our self-preoccupations.  It is an invitation to face into one's own hell in the presence of the invisible Presence.  To face the darkness, demons, shadows of one's own human heart – our terrors, our lies, our subterfuge.

In this way of prayer one is willing to be drawn into dark nights of soul, sense, spirit to be detached from one's own selfishness – a kenosis in imitation of Christ.  It is a descent into a luminous darkness to be reordered according to a new pattern of love and wisdom or insight.

Education

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Professional Interests

Iona Spirituality Institute

Schola Ministries and Anima Schola