In this sixth and final extract from Patrick Collins' essay on the Spirituality of Thomas Merton, we find Thomas Merton grappling with a fear that monastic life and contemplation was becoming downgraded in the Church, and in the world. He saw a continual challenge in the tension or balance required for a contemplative to be both in the world and to be withdraw from the world.

Part VI: Spiritual aviation…

As Merton became more of a social activist himself during the 1960's, he wrote of the necessity yet the frustrations of activism for one who feels called to the contemplative life. In a 1964 letter to the Shaker scholar, Edward Deming Andrews, he said that in the contemplative life one may imagine that one would spend all the time absorbed in contemplation, but this is not the case "There are always innumerable things to be done and obstacles to getting them done, and large and small troubles." (Edward Deming Andrews Mar 13, 64 HGL 39)

God works in history, therefore a contemplative who has no sense of history, no sense of historical responsibility, is not a fully Christian contemplative.

By 1962 Thomas Merton had clearly connected contemplation with the world of action as he wrote to his Brazilian religious friend, Sister M. Emmanuel. "God works in history, therefore a contemplative who has no sense of history, no sense of historical responsibility, is not a fully Christian contemplative: he is gazing at God as a static essence or as an intellectual light, or as a nameless ground of being... We must confront Him in the awful paradoxes of our day, in which we see that our society is being judged. And in all this we have to retain a balance and a good sense which seem to require a miracle, and yet they are the fruit of ordinary grace. In a word we have to continue to be Christians in all the full dimensions of the Gospel." (Sr. M. Emmanuel 1.16.62 HGL 187)

Carmelite nuns generating spiritual electricity for the Holy Office…

During the Second Vatican Council, Thomas Merton feared that the Roman Catholic Church was losing its sense of rootedness in contemplation by becoming overly activistic — even in the newly emphasized active participation of the laity in the liturgy. He wrote of his fears to his Anglican friend, Etta Gullick, in 1964 that the climate of the Anglican Church seemed to him to be quite favorable to contemplation. He suggested that the Anglicans have a special job to keep alive this spiritual simplicity and honesty quite apart from all fuss and works. "It seems to me that the atmosphere in our Church on the other hand is going to become more and more hostile to contemplative prayer. There will certainly be official pronouncements approving it and blessing it. But in fact the movement points in the direction of activism, and an activistic concept of liturgy. I think the root of the trouble is fear and truculence, unrealized, deep down. The realization that the Church of Rome is not going to be able to maintain a grandiose and pre-eminent sort of position, the old prestige she has always had and the decisive say in the things of the world, to some extent even in the last centuries. Contemplation will be regarded more and more as an official 'dynamo' source of inspiration and power for the big guns out there: Carmelite nuns generating spiritual electricity for the Holy Office, not so much by contemplative prayer as by action and official public prayer within an enclosure." He saw the temper of the Roman Church as combative and aroused. The emphasis on contemplation will be more and more dominated by a specific end in view. Implicitly then contemplation will become ordered to action. "When this happens, the real purity of the life of prayer is gone."

	Monks at Prayer in Gethsemani Abbey www.monks.org

As novice master at Gethsemani Abbey he was pleased that there was a good proportion of contemplative prayer. He didn't teach any particular special methods but tried to make them love the freedom and peace of being with God alone in faith and simplicity. That would help to abolish all divisiveness and diminish all useless strain and concentration on one's own efforts and all formalism: "all the nonsense of taking seriously the apparatus of an official prayer life, in the wrong way but to love liturgy in simple faith as the place of Christ's sanctifying presence in the community." (Gullick, Etta 9.12.64 HGL 367-368)

Fears for the dilution of the contemplative life…

After Vatican II Monk Merton wrote to Archbishop George Flahiff of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada about his fears for the dilution of the contemplative life in monasteries in general and at Gethsemani in particular. In the spring and again in the summer of 1966 he wrote of monasteries becoming such busy places that monks could not concentrate on the contemplative life. For him it was a matter of conscience. He stated that he personally did not want to get involved in a great deal of very active work except to do his "small part, at least by discreetly participating in closed meetings, giving small retreats or occasional conferences." The basic question for him was to be one of a correct understanding of the contemplative life. He spoke of his own Abbot, Dom James Fox, as pursuing "a policy of negation and suppression in regard to anything that would bring monks into any kind of contact with the world... His view, to put it frankly, is that as long as the monks are all kept locked up in the monastery and as long as contacts of any kind with anyone outside the monastery are cut off, the monks are 'contemplatives'......he was for a while a standing joke among the American abbots of our Order.... I can say that we are not really forming contemplatives at all, that there is a great deal of unrest and questioning, and that the monks themselves feel that this kind of policy of suppression is merely stultifying and sterilizing." (Flahiff, George 5.15.66 HGL 250-2)

Entrance to Gethsemani Abbey www.monks.org

Thomas Merton had a long-standing dispute with Dom James, about not being able to travel and attend conferences outside the monastery. The abbot feared that travelling and lecturing away from the monastery would dissipate Merton's monastic energies and perhaps contribute to confusion in his vocation. To Archbishop Flahiff the monk wrote of what he felt were deleterious effects of such extreme claustration for monastics. He said that the principle is being misapplied that contemplatives are not supposed to leave their monasteries to undertake any form of active work. Admittedly some were trying to lure them out into the active ministry. This, Merton held, is self-defeating and leads only to inertia and stagnation in the contemplative life. "This stagnation is in fact one of the problems we confront. The stultifying effect of rigid formalities is still very evident in many contemplative monasteries."

Principles were being misinterpreted and misapplied especially in what concerns the difference between essentials and accidentals in monastic living. While the differences are by no means absolutely clear, it is often reduced to antique customs and interpretations still regarded as essentials. This makes valid renewal impossible. The whole question of communication with the outside world and information about the outside world on the part of men contemplatives and women too was a case in point. "Some are still considering that men have to be so strictly cloistered that they never go out, except in case of grave illness, never participate in study sessions, conferences, which might be of great use to them, etc. etc. Certainly there ought to be great liberality in letting them visit other monasteries, to broaden themselves." (Flahiff, George 6.7.66 HGL 253-4)

During 1967 Thomas Merton reflected with Rosemary Ruether, a theologian at Howard University in Washington, D. C., about the secular context and the effects of contemplation upon the world. Ruether had suggested that monastic life was too anti-worldly. He contended that contemplative awareness and living leads to a less divided person. It integrates mind, soul and body beyond the usual Western dualism. It is this unity of the person that is contemplation's great contribution to society. He refused in practice to accept any theory or method of contemplation that simply divides soul against body, interior against exterior by pushing creatures out into the dark. "What dark? As soon as the split is made, the dark is abysmal in everything, and the only way to get back into the light is to be once again a normal human being who likes to smell the flowers and look at girls if they are around, and who likes the clouds, etc. On the other hand, the real purpose of asceticism is not cutting off one's relation to created things and other people, but normalizing and healing it."

Merton reflected the Greek Father in considering the contemplative life to be the restoration of man in Christ. He said that he was in the line of the paradise tradition in monastic thought. This is also part and parcel of the desert tradition as eschatological. "The monk here and now is supposed to be living the life of the new creation in which the right relation to all the rest of God's creatures is fully restored. Hence Desert Father stories about tame lions and all that jazz." (Ruether, Rosemary 3.9.67 HGL 503)

Request from Pope Paul VI — more questions than answers…

In 1967 Pope Paul VI asked Thomas Merton to write something about the contemplative life for the Vatican's Synod of Bishops. The Trappist was disturbed by the request, not knowing what in reality could be said. He also questioned whether he was the best one to write on the subject of "spiritual aviation." In earlier years he had had more "answers." Now he had far more "questions" about contemplation and action. Having become more re-connected to "the world" during the 1960's, monk Merton was more aware of the difficulty in conveying the contemplative message to people of that time. He wrote of his reactions to Dom Francis Decroix, the Cistercian abbot, stating that he was acutely embarrassed by the Holy Father's request. "It puts us all in a difficult position. We are not experts in anything. There are few real contemplatives in our monasteries. We know nothing whatever of spiritual aviation and it would be the first duty of honesty to admit that fact frankly, and to add that we do not speak the language of modern man... The problem of the contemplative Orders at present, in the presence of modern man, is a problem of great ambiguity. People look at us, recognize we are sincere, recognize that we have indeed found a certain peace, and see that there may after all be some worth to it: but can we convince them that this means anything to them?"

Monk Merton said that, when he first became a monk, he was more sure of 'answers,' But as he aged and advanced further into solitude, he was becoming aware that he had only begun to seek the questions. "And what are the questions? Can man make sense out of his existence? Can man honestly give his life meaning merely by adopting a certain set of explanations which pretend to tell him why the world began and where it will end, why there is evil and what is necessary for a good life? My brother, perhaps in my solitude I have become as it were an explorer for you, a searcher in realms which you are not able to visit – except perhaps in the company of your psychiatrist. I have been summoned to explore a desert area of man's heart in which explanations no longer suffice, and in which one learns that only experience counts." (Decroix, Dom Francis 8.22.67 HGL 158-159)

	Thomas Merton, known in the monastery as Fr. Louis, was born on 31 January 1915 in Prades, southern France. The young Merton attended schools in France, England, and the United States. At Columbia University in New York City, he came under the influence of some remarkable teachers of literature, including Mark Van Doren, Daniel C. Walsh, and Joseph Wood Krutch. Merton entered the Catholic Church in 1938 in the wake of a rather dramatic conversion experience. Shortly afterward, he completed his masters thesis, “On Nature and Art in William Blake”. Following some teaching at Columbia University Extension and at St. Bonaventure’s College, Olean, New York, Merton entered the monastic community of the Abbey of Gethsemani at Trappist, Kentucky, on 10 December 1941. He was received by Abbot Frederic Dunne who encouraged the young Frater Louis to translate works from the Cistercian tradition and to write historical biographies to make the Order better known. The abbot also urged the young monk to write his autobiography, which was published under the title The Seven Storey Mountain (1948) and became a best-seller and a classic. During the next 20 years, Merton wrote prolifically on a vast range of topics, including the contemplative life, prayer, and religious biographies. His writings would later take up controversial issues (e.g., social problems and Christian responsibility: race relations, violence, nuclear war, and economic injustice) and a developing ecumenical concern. He was one of the first Catholics to commend the great religions of the East to Roman Catholic Christians in the West. Merton died by accidental electrocution in Bangkok, Thailand, while attending a meeting of religious leaders on 10 December 1968, just 27 years to the day after his entrance into the Abbey of Gethsemani. Many esteem Thomas Merton as a spiritual master, a brilliant writer, and a man who embodied the quest for God and for human solidarity. Since his death, many volumes by him have been published, including five volumes of his letters and seven of his personal journals. According to present count, more than 60 titles of Merton's writings are in print in English, not including the numerous doctoral dissertations and books about the man, his life, and his writings. Brother Patrick Hart, OCSO From: www.monks.org/thomasmerton.html

During the fall months of 1967, Thomas Merton commented to others about this difficult task of writing the message from contemplatives which the pope had requested. To Etta Gullick in August he admitted the importance of trying to say something about the subject in order to "protect these people against the irresponsible gossip and nonsense of those who haven't the faintest idea what it is all about in the first place." He ended by telling here that contemplation is a matter for minorities while "the majorities are all rushing off with banners waving to conquer something or other." (Gullick, Etta 8.31.67 HGL 378-379)

To his friend at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, W. H. "Ping" Ferry, Merton was more blunt in expressing his frustrations that September. He wrote that, in his private opinion, "contemplatives are a bunch of dolts and squares – at least the Catholic ones, and they have nothing to say to the modern world at least until such time as they wake up and come alive." (Ferry, W. H. 9.5.67 HGL 234) He wrote in October in a similar vein to Bruno Schlesinger, a professor at St. Mary's College in Indiana. He was amused that the progressive and activist Catholics were hailing the Beatles as very hip people. But then all of a sudden the Beatles started going to a yogi to learn contemplation which is anathema to the progressive Catholics. "My feeling is that our progressives don't know what they are talking about, in their declarations about modern man, the modern world, etc. Perhaps they are dealing with some private myth or other. That is their affair..." (Schlesinger, Bruno 10.16.67 HGL 546)

Not without hope for the future…

Still, for Thomas Merton, contemplatives were not without hope for the future. With his ever broadening reading and learning from persons in other cultures, he found the greatest hope for the future of the contemplative life in the Third World. In September of 1967 he wrote to an African priest who later became a bishop named Christopher Mwoleka stating that the African sense of the wholeness and unity of life could give a new birth to the contemplative life and will bring new life to the Church of the future. He sensed that God wanted him to experience contemplation in a deeply African way which would be "a way of wholeness, a way of unity with all life, a sense of the deep rhythm of natural and cosmic life as the manifestation of God's creative power: and also a great warmth of love and praise." He concluded that, If one realizes that God's gift of Spirit is the source of all joy and strength, and of one trusts God to purify the heart with the Divine presence and love, "in great simplicity, He will teach you the joy of being a child of God, an African child of God with your own special unique gifts." (Mwoleka, Christopher 9.13.67 HGL 462)

Thomas Merton had come a long way toward realizing the simplicity of a child of God during his twenty-seven years as a monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani. And his letters to his friends enable us to join the same Journey.

NAVIGATION: PART I | PART II | PART III | PART IV | PART V | PART VI

Photo Credits:
The background images used in the headline are sourced from stock.xchng and are the work of Kay Pat, New Delhi, India. URL: www.sxc.hu/profile/KayPat.
The image of Thomas Merton used in the text was sourced from Thomas Merton Books website at: www.thomasmertonbooks.com/about_us.asp
Other images by Brian Coyne

Links to Merton websites:
The Thomas Merton Collection at Bellarmine University
The International Thomas Merton Society
The Merton Institute for Contemplative Living
 

Fr Patrick W. Collins PhD lives in Michigan and has long been very supportive of our endeavours here at Catholica Australia. Fr Collins retired from active ministry earlier last year but one suspects that "retirement" is the inappropriate descriptor. It's more like a change of direction as to how he continues his ministry. On his own website (www.vatican2.org/patrickcollins/) he describes himself as "author, preacher, musician and university professor. He senses that his principal vocation is to contemplative living — out of which his various ministries flow. In addition to numerous books and articles, Fr. Collins has produced forty-five TV programs, and a number of videos, among them Thomas Merton: Man, Monk, Myth with Music. Fr. Collins presents various kinds of retreats, missions, and workshops, including what he calls 'spiritual concerts' which combine texts and tunes for spiritual insight and growth. This approach gives a feelingful dimension to the meaning of the words and connects head with heart, reason and imagination. He calls it "Music with a Message."

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Patrick can be contracted through his own website at: www.vatican2.org/patrickcollins/.

©2007Patrick W Collins

[Index of commentaries by Patrick Collins]