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WHAT I SAY HERE REGARDING MERTON COULD SOMEWHAT BE SAID OF MYSELF AND PROBABLY MANY WHO ARE DRAWN TO HIS WORK.One of the first notable characteristics of his appearance was that he was lopsided in his stance.This accounts for the years of orthopedic miseries he suffered.One side of him,I believe it was his left,no pun intended that he leaned to the left.Not even his habit "hung" just right on him.A suit was impossible.but that is not quite what I mean about being lopsided.More to the point is his characteristic extremism,his tendency to go off on tangents and to pursue them thoroughly. On one hand,that has given us some of his best,most complete work.On the other,that tendency keeps a monk in a constant state of tension.As I say,applied to myself,been there,had that. First signs of it show in "Jonas" where he gets an interest in the Carthusians.He goes wholehog,comes close to joining them but,the journalist tendency in him is smart enough to find out the dark side of their life.He finds out that in their solitude they still are required to recite a ton of written prayers,litanies,perform all sorts of devotions they had accrued over centuries.So that turns him off.His heart leanings were for a life of solitude but a simple one in which the hermit could have a great deal of freetime to pursue his own program of prayer and study,not a life wherein almost every moment of cell time was scripted.So,slowly the entries on Carthusians diminish. He later looks at the Camoldolese after they come to Big Sur circa 1955.Then digs into Franciscan and Carmelite life. All of this produced some fine essays but they had to create in him restlessness and discontent with his own life. Part of what was happening then was that he was going through what many younger cradle-catholics have gone through,the searching among religious orders to find the "right one" for them.After his conversion,it was Franciscans,then Dan Walsh led him to Trappists and that was it.So he had to go through this selection process backwards during his early years of Trappist life.It is a torturous process in which the person looks at all the literature which is always idealized,never a true picture of the reality,and then looks at his own lifestyle,which is real.Naturally,the latter will come up short-it is REAL! Do not confuse an idealist with reality,at least not until he is much older and more mature than Tom was at that stage.Even then,tho,there were consistencies;a manifest desire for monastic basics,a desire for spiritual simplicity-all we complicated people crave simplicity which is bought at a tremendous price over many years of searching.He craved authenticity at a time when Trappist life was packed with odd,Gaulish customs which meant nothing to a young man of Merton's time and onward.He spurned superficiality in all things,false "piety",multi-devotionalism,all the Post-Tridentine accretions of the Roman Chuch of his day.His influence on monasticism regarding such is obvious but he also influenced non-monastics in this from the 60s on.Todays remodeled cathedrals would appeal to him,I think,all the bric-a-brac and the hideous plaster statues gone to the dump.His search for the authentic led him to Oriental religions at a time when only a few catholics were looking that way and hardly anyone even knew about it. So when his first collection of essays were published on the subject,many people were shocked,they thought he had lost faithdd not see that hewas integrating what he could from those traditions into his own faith in Jesus Christ,not rejecting the Lord.Fr. Jim Conners has recently published a letter about this and it is long overdue and right ontask.Yet I feel it must be said again-MERTON WAS A JESUS-MAN through and through.All his other pathways of study were integrated into his experience and love of Jesus!Kirkegaard taught that if one "loses the faith" then it was not real faith anyway since true FAITH/gk.PISTIS cannot be lost. I agree.One can discard secondary beliefs passed off as "The True Faith" but once blessed with an experience of the Lord Jesus Christ,and filled with His Spirit,that is it,Charlie!!! Try to deny it,I dare you! In his Asian Journals is clear that Calcutta and all its commercialized pseudo-hinduism upset him a bit,one last shred of over-idealism was purged by his stay there,preparing the way for his great breakthrough to come.He was to soon become a "sleeping,smiling Buddha." In that he would finally get the lopsidedness out of his personality if not his skeletal system.No matter,that,he was about to leave the skeleton behind anyway. Sadly most of us have to learn the interior Sabbath late in life.Some never do.Take a lesson from his life. When you have just read "the best book I ever read on the topic",perish that thought. Somebody else is writing a better one right now. |
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