louie, louie

the birthday of Thomas Merton

2012-01-31T10:27:00.001-05:00


Thomas Merton Photo by John Howard Griffin

Today is the 97th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Merton.

My Catholicism is not the religion of the bourgeoisie nor will it ever be. My Catholicism is of all the world and of all ages. It dates from the beginning of the world. The first man was the image of Christ and contained Christ, even as he was created, as savior in his heart. The first man was destined to be the ancestor of his Redeemer and the first woman was the mother of all life, in the image of the Immaculate Daughter who was full of grace, Mother of mercy, Mother of the saved.
-- Thomas Merton
Introductions East & West, 35-6

HT: Jim Forest

acrobats and pure prayer - Phillippe Petit

2012-01-25T16:38:00.007-05:00

PHOTOGRAPH: Aerialist Philippe Petite opens dedication of St.John The Divine. Credit: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times, 1982

Every now and then a person comes along who, though not overtly religious, is innately contemplative.

Luke, over at Intense City has an intriguing post ("Settling into the Heart") today about the movement from the head to the heart, referencing the word munem, which in Japanese Zen means intelligent action without thinking, and a quote from a Chinese Zen master: “If you want to see into it, see into it directly. When you begin to think about it, it is altogether missed.”

Luke provides Unknown Friend’s notion of concentrating without effort with the wonderful example of the tightrope walker:

“Look at a tightrope walker. He is evidently completely concentrated, because if he were not, he would fall to the ground. His life is at stake, and it is only perfect concentration which can save him. Yet do you believe that his thought and his imagination are occupied in what he is doing? Do you think that he reflects and that he imagines, that he calculates and that he makes plans with regard to each step he makes on the rope?” - Unknown Friend

(This all sounds like how Cynthia Bourgealt teaches Centering prayer. Cynthia says that one moves out of the head into a sort of vague area where one trusts the awareness of that moment.)

Anyway, Luke expresses this all so well over at his site. The photo that he posted, which I have re-posted above because I love it so much, is of Phillipe Petit, the French high wire artist walking on a wire to the Cathedral of St. John of the Divine in 1982. Petit is best known for his wire-walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on August 7, 1974. When I watched the film, Man on a Wire, about this walk, I recognized that Petit was, in fact, a contemplative; he embodies concentration without effort! Of course, this is the point that Luke makes.

Can performance art be called "prayer"? Lax does:

“It has all the business about the sun coming out and Mogodor coming down the field and they way he said hello. Completely casual – hello. They didn’t leave any doubt that they were pleased to see me. They took me right into the family. Mogador and I would go out on the trucks all night and talk. He enjoyed talking. He suggested calling my book “Unfolding Grace.” He had been reading some mystic and he was getting good ideas. He said the thing about a performance or anything like it was throwing everything away. What you’re doing is getting rid of everything by every gesture and everything you do. And then you’ve got this pure thing left.

“… even a somersault on horseback, for example, after it had gotten to be everything you might think it was – like a test of your strength, a test of your power, or a good way to amaze the public – everything it might be except just this thrill act itself – is what you’ve thrown away. It is like a mystical thing.

“… I think it’s what Merton is saying about prayer, - whatever it is, anything in it that is an impurity, that is anything but the act itself, which is practically unnamable. And if it is what it should be, then the poetry is prayer, the acrobatic act is prayer.

“Pure act, I think it’s a metaphysical concept starting with Aristotle and flowering in St. Thomas that God is pure act and that there is no POTENTIA in Him. But that almost everything else in the universe is IN POTENTIA, it’s on its way to being pure act, on its way to unity with God. But only God is pure act. And that made me think about a lot of things. One of them is that business of the purity of an acrobatic performance, of any performance, at the point where it becomes really pure, is at its closest to the divine and closest to that unity.”

“Throwing everything away except the act itself, and I think at that point it also joins with the ideas of Zen, that everything is right here in this moment, and all those same things are being thrown away in what they describe as the Zen act. So if you were living in that kind of purity or call it action, it would be close to the kingdom of heaven. = Lax (p. 437-438, "When Prophecy Had A Voice")

- see also the louie blog post: "lax on pure act"

It certainly seems like this is what is happening during Centering Prayer.

HT: Intense City

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waiting

2012-01-23T07:35:00.003-05:00

Robert Lax

The following is excerpted from "Mystics: Ten Who Show Us the Ways of God" by Murray Bodo. The last chapter is about Lax and I like how Bodo is able to pull from Lax's writing the vocation of waiting that is at the heart of his spirituality.

"I open my eyes in the dark and see darkness. I close my eyes, even in the light, and see darkness. All the same darkness. Almost the same. Light comes and goes, but the darkness stays. Almost always the same. A fairly steady darkness. One you can count on. Almost." (Lax, 21 Pages, p. 191)
Almost. Because even darkness becomes a sort of light that is not darkness.
"My observatory powers in the meantime had grown keener. I could see in the dark. I could see much further into the dark than before.” (Lax, 21 Pages, p. 194)
Even of darkness Lax is positive, grateful, blissful.

“My dark night of the soul, if that’s what it is. My long night’s waiting, if that’s what it is. I saw a lot more then, on those nights of sleeping, not sleeping under bridges, sleeping, not sleeping on benches, under trees, in barn or on church steps than I’m seeing now. No matter. I continue to watch." (Lax, 21 Pages, p. 194)

For Lax the watching is all because,

“I’m looking ahead. I’m looking toward some point, some vanishing point, or anyway, not yet visible point in the distance, in the future where something or someone I’d recognize would appear. (Where you would appear.) ….
“My person. My beloved, if you like; my sought-after-being, my remembered-one, would be there.” (Lax, 21 Pages, p.197)
I love that in this passage and throughout Lax's oeuvre, there is no mechanical, muscular working to attain some goal, to attain God, but a looking, a waiting, a receptivity to receive the other. Lax has no righteous sense of his won accomplishment in work or in prayer or of his own virtue. Insead all he is and brings is ...

“A readiness to recognize you; that’s all I’ve brought, that’s what I bring to the encounter.” (Lax, 21 Pages, p.197)
And even then, even recognizing why it is he waits and lookes in silence, he doesn’t take credit for that stance. Rather, he says,
"I didn’t give up because I couldn’t. I didn’t, because I was made to go on waiting. Made, put together, invented, born, for that single, singular purpose: to watch, to wait. There’s no giving up on who you are … I’ve wondered sometimes if you came, and I saw you, and I knew you were there, I’d continue to go on waiting.” (Lax, 21 Pages, p. 198-199)

- Mystics: Ten Who Show Us the Ways of God, by Murray Bodo, Kindle Location 3178 of 4267

sweating under the mask

2012-01-17T07:38:00.002-05:00

"Alienation begins when culture divides me against myself, puts a mask on me, gives me a role I may or may not want to play. Alienation is complete when I become completely identified with my mask, totally satisfied with my role, and convince myself that any other identity or role is inconceivable.

"The man who sweats under his mask, whose role makes him itch with discomfort, who hates the division in himself, is already beginning to be free."

-- Thomas Merton
The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton
edited by Patrick Hart
New York: New Directions, 1981, p 381

the monk is anyone who seeks to become one, single person ...

2012-01-07T12:35:00.002-05:00

"Though addressing monks in his own monastery, St. Hesychios speaks to all of us on the contemplative path when he says, "One who has renounced such things as marriage, possessions and other worldly pursuits is outwardly a monk, but may not be a monk inwardly. Only the person who has renounced obsessive thoughts is a true monk." For Hesychios, then, a monk is not a geriatric vegetarian who mutters prayers, but any woman or man who seeks to become one, single person (the root meaning of "monk"), instead of the chameleon who constantly changes according to the color of demanding relationships ...

... It is not ultimately a question of embracing the externals of monasticism. We may go off to retreat houses or enter a monastery, but unless we quieten the world of inner chatter, we never enter. Countless numbers of monastics may live decades in a monastery without ever entering the monastery in the sense St. Hesychios or St. Theodoros intends, because we cling to chatter like a dog to to a bone ..."

- Martin Laird, "A Sunlit Absence - Silence, Awareness and Contemplation", Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 40

photos of Dan Berrigan released from jail, 1972

2012-01-04T13:48:00.002-05:00

Photo copyright by John Goodwin john@goodwinphotos.com

A couple of photos of Dan Berrigan as he was released from the Danbury prion on the 24th of February, 1972. The photos were taken by John Goodwin. Jim Forest is at the left. HT to Jim.

Photo copyright by John Goodwin john@goodwinphotos.com

The Poetry of Thomas Merton - summer 1966

2012-01-02T16:13:00.001-05:00

I have promised longtime louie reader, Mr. Spaget, a poem by Merton that impresses me. Merton thought of creativity/art as an act of work/labour. From Rowan Williams, "A Silent Action: p. 46:

"Labor is to do this rather than that, and to engage in the discipline and limits of doing this rather than that. Work, labour, involves local commitment and specificity. Work is what has to be done in this moment, here and now, by this person, in the encounter ...

"He speaks of 'this unique instant' in terms of 'the sense of water on the skin,' a very powerful image. The poet acts, works, in that moment of contact with truth."

And Merton knew that he wasn't quite there. From a letter to St. Therese Lentfoehr, written in 1948:

"With me, I know what the trouble is. I come upon a situation and the situation seems to require a poem. But the poem turns out to be not the precise, individual poem which that specific situation had demanded from all eternity but just 'a poem'. A generic poem by Thomas Merton that is something like all the other poems by Thomas Merton and which he drags out of his stock to fit on every situation that comes along. That is why Figures for an Apocalypse is a whole string of complete misses. All I can say is that the arrows were in the general direction of some target or other but I'd be hard put to it to connect the firing with the real object that was there to be fired at."

And then came the summer of 1966. That was the tormented summer that Merton fell in love with the nurse, that he made no sense whatsoever to himself or others, confounding his abbot, his fellow monks, and his friends. This is the poem:

summer 1966

Bright post-examination weather; in the redudant
classroom, the only point seems here, the belly
of Kentucky heat, the shaven sweating mariners
singing Gregorian shanties in a slow
light evening. What do I want? What sixteen-year-olds want,
no doubt; but also: to learn how to sail that sweaty ship,
words falling moistly from the timber, shining,
Latin, American, French. And the horizon that you think
(so slow the light, so slow the gestures and the voices)
night never quite closes on.

                      The same month
you made a landfall, emptied on to the shore,
gasping and heaving against a new hard element,
against the solid sand. And now I read you, years on,
leap and flail, mouth wide, reaching - you once-fluent fellow --
for the words to fix it, finding in the unfixable
a bizarre homeliness. You spent my sixteenth birthday
making a clean(ish) breast of things to the steel smile
of Abbot James. You staged show after show
for friends, then cancelled. Not to make sense is
what most matters.

                      What was I seeing,
then, that summer? light from a dead star?
Not quite. But who could tell the night, closing its mouth,
the hard sand, were, after all, where the hot songs
would lead? Practise the Gothic scales for long enough
and they will conjure, surprisingly, this place, flat concrete
     blocks,
convenience foods, an empty page to look into,
finding the anger; painting, then blotting faces you might
     wear,
hers, yours, that only in fiction would stand still.
Not to make sense, inside the keel of sweating ribs,
not to make sense but room.

I'd say he hit the target with this one.

Poetry is not, and is against, magic

2012-01-02T11:54:00.001-05:00

Photo by Thomas Merton

I am reading Rowan Williams’ book of essays about Merton now. Rowan is a noted critic of poetry and there is an essay about poetry, where Williams says [that Merton says] that poetry isn’t, and is against, magic.

“‘It is the businessman, the propagandist, the politician, not the poet, who devoutly believes in the magic of words.’, writes Merton, ‘for the poet, there is precisely no magic, only life in all its unpredictability and freedom. All magic is a ruthless venture into manipulation, a vicious circle, a self-fulfilling prophecy.’ Words that ‘work’, independent of their transparency to truth, are magical words. They live without anchorage in reality. They exist in order to exercise power, to control or develop a situation according to the will of the speaker.”

-from "A Silent Action, Engagements with Thomas Merton", by Rowan Williams, Fons Vitae 2011, p. 41

saints

2011-12-31T06:49:00.000-05:00

Photo by JofIndia

"... the saint is an "icon" not merely in the sense that he "stands for" or "witnesses to" the divine order, but because he is truly the channel through which God's energies enter into the human world. The saint's vision of the world is God's vision of the world, because the saint is transparent to God: in the person of the saint contemplating God, God contemplates the world."

-Rowan Williams, "A Silent Action, Engagements with Thomas Merton", Fons Vitae 2011, p. 34

mud pies and kites (compassion)

2011-12-30T10:44:00.003-05:00

Discernment is being grasped in the Spirit's arms and led in the rhythms of an unknown dance.

2011-12-28T12:35:00.001-05:00

"Spiritual discernment asks us to pay attention. We need to attend to both what goes on around us and within us. Ideally, this attentiveness goes on much of the time, a sort of low level, constant spiritual sifting of the data of our experience. But there are times when discernment becomes much more focused, when a crossroad is reached or a choice called for. At times like these the cumulative wisdom of tradition tells us to pay attention on many levels: to consult Scripture, to seek the advice of trusted advisors, to head the sensum fidelium (the collective sense of the faithful), to read widely and deeply the best ancient and contemporary thinking; to pray, to attend to the prick of conscience and to the yearnings and dreamings of our hearts, to watch, to wait, to listen.

"Discernment is about discriminating: sifting through and evaluating the evidence of our focused attention. It is not, however, identical to problem solving. It is not simply a question of lining up the pros and cons concerning a particular decision we must make and then judging which choice is feasible or determining which gains the most support or which will benefit us, or others, in the long run.

"Discernment is more like the turning of the sunflower to the sun, or the intuitive hunch of the scientist seeking new and creating solutions for unexplainable, contradictory observations, or the restless seeking of a heart longing to find its way home to an estranged lover, or the artistry of the musician, sculptor, or choreographer delineating in sound, stone, or the human body the emergent, self-propellant, rightful line that says, 'yes.''

"Discernment is about feeling texture, assessing weight, watching the plumb line, listening for overtones, searching for shards, feeling the quickening, surrendering to love. It is being grasped in the Spirit's arms and led in the rhythms of an unknown dance."

— Wendy M. Wright, "Passing Angels: The Arts of Spiritual Discernment," Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life, Vol. X, No. 6, Nov/Dec 1995

psalm

2011-12-22T07:43:00.001-05:00

Robert Lax, Photo by Hartmut Geerken

This seems to be Lax's version of Merton's I don't know where I'm going prayer. I just discovered it yesterday in Murray Bodo's book, "Mystics: Ten Who Show Us the Ways of God".

I am here for you. I have no other person to be here for and no other reason to be here. I am here at your disposal. Your disposition. I have no desire except to do what you'd have me do. I have heard of other desires. I haven't heard of any that mean as much to me as that. Haven't heard of any that would mean as much to me as knowing I was doing what you wanted me to do. Or even not knowing I was doing it. Simply doing it.

Why would I wish so much to do what you'd want me to? Only because I think I was made for that purpose. To listen & do. To get my mind clear enough to listen & do then do what I hear I should do. How do I know that the voice I'd hear would be yours? How can I know that the thing I should do is a good one?

I'd know because there is something I know about you. I know that you love me. I know that the things you tell me to do are from love. You don't tell me to kill. You don't tell me to die. You tell me to love. You tell me to do the things love does. You show me the way.

- Robert Lax, Psalm, (Zurich, Switzerland. Pendo, 1991), pp 8, 10

Lax Gravesite Photo

2011-12-21T07:42:00.002-05:00

Photo by James Sedwick

I'm not sure if the angel is part of the gravesite or not. When I was there last year I did not notice the angel, but I've seen other photos of Lax's final resting place which include it. It seems like it serendipitously is supposed to be there.

Mary of the Sign (icon)

2011-12-05T09:46:00.001-05:00

And far beneath the movement of this silent cataclysm Mary slept in the infinite tranquility of God, and God was a child curled up who slept in her and her veins were flooded with His wisdom which is night, which is starlight, which is silence. And her whole being was embraced in Him whom she embraced and they became tremendous silence.

-Thomas Merton

Mary of the Sign, one of the oldest images of Mary with Christ standing in an orb, pressed to her interior. She experiences Christ in His Essence, in her being; they are inseparable.

Mary stands square to the viewer, her poised stillness or silent constant prayer is noted in the hands, palms extended outward in total surrender to what has been given. Mary clutches and yearns for nothing. In early icons Mary was portrayed as the Burning Bush and Christ the fire that burns within. She is represented as the divine vessel of burning love. She knows and loves Him even before His birth.

The orb containing this revelation rests within her being, Christ surrounded in gold, symbolizing the totality of god without image. Christ is holding a tiny scroll, a symbol of the Scripture being fulfilled in Him and later to be filled in each and every one of us. Christ is our interior teacher, guide master, and rabbi. The icon’s theology is the link between the Jewish tradition and the new understanding of Christ.

“The Lord Himself will give you a sign, behold a young woman shall conceive and bear a child and his name will be emmanuel.” - ISaIaH 7:14.

excerpt taken from The Mary Collection 2008 by Mary Jane Miller. To see more work done by Mary Jane Miller, go to: http://sanmiguelicons.com/galleries.php

the nothing

2011-11-05T08:59:00.000-05:00

Lax Drawing, from a photo by Jim Forest (self portrait?)

sentences

by no means mention
what's really
on your mind

nothing is
on my mind

don't mention
it
---
whatever you have
to say
will get itself
said

don't worry

who worries?

that's all i'm
telling
you:
don't
---
you go out
to the edge
of the universe,

it'll still be
on your
mind

nothing
is

it'll still
be there
---
you don't have to
try to remember
it

the fact is, you
can't forget

forget what?

the nothing.
whatever it
is

-Robert Lax, from the journal A, p. 36

nothing is on my mind (contemplative art)

2011-11-03T14:38:00.003-05:00

Photo by Jim Forest

Not that I could ever afford it, but being captivated by all things Lax, I find this book fascinating. It seems more like a work of art than a book. The title intrigues me. I practice Centering Prayer and one of the things that happens in this prayer is a movement away from "thinking". Having nothing on your mind. When thinking happens, you "ever so gently" (as Fr. Thomas Keating says) let go of it.

The book contains extracts from the Lax journals A, B and D. Only 25 books were made by the German press, Edition Schwarse Seite. 63 hand bound pages on hand made paper. $1500 each. If I had money, I might buy one. The one photographed here is at St. Bonaventure University in Olean NY, home of the Lax Archives.

Photo by Jim Forest

I've always suspected that Lax was a natural contemplative, and his writing, like the artworks of Ad Reinhardt leads one toward this contemplative kind of non-thinking awareness. Lax blurs the line between visual and literary art (and a lot of other things), but ends up with utterly simple utterings.

Prospectus: "Infinity's a pretzel curve. Notes from journals, one of a complete day, wandering, moving in circles, like talking on different levels. Selected parts from notes on other days are concentrated, calm and meditative, with delicate humor. Lax's kind of writing demands a slow reading, the reader has to put syllables together to words. Graphics and texts try the impossibility of capturing in paint or words in song or by any other art or in any other medium the actuality of the object."

Interestingly, during his last year Steve Jobs was interested the art of Mark Rothko. Rothko's work is considered "spiritual". He created Rothko Chapel in Houston, a place for non-denominational contemplation. Jobs was looking for art that could inspire people working at Apple.

Seven Story Mountain Book Covers UPDATE

2011-11-02T12:59:00.003-05:00

UPDATE: Brian sent a photo of his 50th anniversary (1998) issue of Seven Story Mountain (see below). Too bad it doesn't have the price on the cover to compare to the 75 cents and 50 cents copies! I still have the First Edition hardcover that belonged to my parents, but alas, the jacket is long gone.

I am fascinated with the stuff that Jim Forest saw on his recent visit to St. Bonaventure University. Jim is an excellent photographer and I would like to add some of his photos to the eclectic collection of the louie blog. (All of Jim's photos from this trip are on his Flickr site HERE.)

Photo by Jim Forest

Photo by Brian Murphy(1998 50th Anniversary edition)

Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Jim Forest

2011-10-17T12:18:00.002-05:00

Jim Forest speaking at the Nazareth Retreat Center in Pittsburgh, October 15, 2011. (The guy next to me had a "Smartpen" - see LiveScribe.com! I had never seen one in action before.)

Over the weekend I went to a "day retreat" on Dorothy Day, led by Jim Forest, in North Pittsburgh. I have corresponded for awhile with Jim about Thomas Merton, and was honored to be able to meet him in person.

His person carries a profound presence and sincerity that I could only glimpse from his internet persona. I was quite blown away. I can see why both Merton and Dorothy Day were drawn to him as a young man, and trusted and believed in him. He is, as far as I can tell, one of the most reliable writers alive to carry on their legacies. Jim speaks simply and in that simplicity is much truth and power.

I met several people at the event that know people that I know from my Florida peace and justice connections. It was held at a Nazareth Retreat Center that felt very familiar to my own Kentucky roots.

Here is a link to a US Catholic interview with Jim about the friendship between Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton. (Thanks, Bryan!)

This is the Nazareth Center, which looks very much like the Nazareth in KY.

Dorothy Day attended silent retreats here which were led by a Pittsburgh priest, Fr. John Hugo. Fr. Hugo was a spiritual guide to Dorothy.

This is the chapel where Dorothy prayed.

Day of a Stranger, Part 1

2011-09-26T06:36:00.002-05:00

Photo by Bryan Sherwood

From Bryan Sherwood Gethsemane Photos

Merton was asked by his friend Miguel Grinberg in Buenos Aires for some journal passages that would describe a "typical day" in his life that could be published in the periodical he edited, Eco Contemporaneo. Merton responded by writing a "journal-like" essay, which he called "Day of a Stranger." The following are excerpts from the first draft of that work, which was later revised.

"I live in the woods out of necessity. I get our of bed in the middle of the night because it is imperative that I hear the silence of the night, alone, and, with my face on the floor, say psalms, alone, in the silence of the night.

"It is necessary for me to live here alone without a woman, for the silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love, and out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world. I have an obligation to preserve the stillness, the silence, the poverty, the virginal point of pure nothingness which is at the center of all other loves. I cultivate this plant silently in the middle of the night and water it with psalms and prophecies in silence. It becomes the most beautiful of all the trees in the garden, at once the primordial paradise tree, the axis mundi, the cosmic axle, and the Cross. Nulla silva talem profert [No tree brings forth such].

"It is necessary for me to see the first point of light which begins to be dawn. It is necessary to be present alone at the resurrection of Day, in the solemn silence at which the sun appears, for at this moment all the affairs of cities, of governments, of war departments, are seen to be the bickerings of mice. I receive from the Eastern woods, the tall oaks, the one word DAY, which is never the same. It is always in a totally new language. "

(to be continued)

"I have to be a person that nobody knows" - Merton

2011-09-13T12:48:00.004-05:00

“Truth can only be spoken by a man nobody knows,” - Rowan Williams

From Jim Forest's review of a new book about Merton by Rowan Williams, "A Silent Action: Engagements with Thomas Merton". I may have to get this book. I was the same age as Williams (18) when Merton died, so most of my exploration and friendship with him occurred after his death as well.

" ... Not the least of the many meeting points for Merton and Rowan is their Orwell-like awareness of the abuse of language, so easily used for magical (that is to say, manipulative) ends. Thus war is described and justified in words that mask its actual purposes, dehumanize the adversary, and cloak its actual cost in human agony. The problem extends to religious words as well — ways of speaking about God that flatten rather than unveil. “Words of faith,” Rowan observes, “are too-well known to believers for their meaning to be knowable.” Indeed, “almost any words in the modern cultural setting will be worn and shabby or illusory and self-serving.” Rowan sees in Merton’s writings how, with ascetic effort, language can be restored to the transparent state of plain speech, a revealer of truth, a preserver of freedom, but this involves a day-by-day, word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence struggle.

"We see in these several essays that Rowan, no less than Merton, regards Christian life without a contemplative dimension as incomplete and also recognizes that the contemplative life is accessible not only to those living in monasteries but to anyone who seeks an “interiorized” monasticism, for “contemplative prayer is the vocation of every believer.” One of the major tasks of contemplative life is the ongoing search for the actual self, the unmasked self, a self that is not merely the stage clothes and scripted sentences that we assemble and dutifully exhibit each day in the attempt to appear to be someone, but the self that exists purely because it exists in God. Rowan notes how often Merton is drawn to a “delusory self image” but then quickly abandons each self-image as a ridiculous deception.

"Merton’s pilgrimage, from his initial attraction to the Trappists until the day of his death, was to disappear — that is not to be the brand name “Thomas Merton” or a Thomas Merton who has become mainly the bearer of various labels: monk, writer, contemplative, mystic, etc. Twice in this book Rowan cites a passage from The Sign of Jonas that he first read when he was eighteen: “I have to be a person that nobody knows. They can have Thomas Merton. He’s dead. Father Louis — he’s half-dead too.” In fact, for all Merton’s grumbling about his famous adversary, Thomas Merton, he remained Thomas Merton, fully alive and always writing in a voice that was intensely and recognizably his own — but a Merton who was unwilling to make himself the prisoner of his readers’ expectations and illusions. (No doubt the struggle not to be defined purely by an ecclesiastical role is every bit as pressing to Rowan as it was to Merton.) “Truth can only be spoken by a man nobody knows,” Rowan writes, “because only in the unknown person is there no obstruction to reality: the ego of self-oriented desire and manifold qualities, seeking to dominate and organize the world, is absent.” ..."

How can one reject the effect if he continues to embrace the cause?

2011-09-05T15:22:00.002-05:00

Photograph by Thomas Merton

Some extracts from the 1963 introduction to the Japanese translation of Seven Story Mountain.

"I have learned to look back into the world with greater compassion, seeing those in it not as alien to myself, not as peculiar and deluded strangers, but as identified with myself. In freeing myself from their delusions and preoccupations, I have identified myself, nonetheless, with their struggles and their blind, desperate hope of happiness.

"But precisely because I am identified with them, I must refuse all the more definitely to make their delusions my own. I must refuse their ideology of matter, power, quantity, movement, activism and force. I reject this because I see it to be the source and expression of the spiritual hell which man has made of his world: the hell which has burst into flame in two total wars of incredible horror the hell of spiritual emptiness and sub-human fury which has resulted in crimes like Auschwitz or Hiroshima. This I can and must reject with all the power of my being. This all sane men seek to reject. But the question is: how can one sincerely reject the effect if he continues to embrace the cause? ...

"The monastery is not an "escape from the world." On the contrary by being in the monastery I take my true part in all the struggles and sufferings of the world. To adopt a life that is essentially non-assertive, a nonviolent life of humility and peace, is in itself a statement of one's position. But each one in such a life can, by the personal modality of his decision, give his whole life a special orientation. It is my intention to make my entire life a rejection of, a protest against the crimes and injustices of war and political tyranny which threaten to destroy the whole race of man and the world with him....

"By my monastic life and vows I am saying no to all the concentration camps, the aerial bombardments, the staged political trials, the judicial murders, the racial injustices, the economic tyrannies, and the whole socio-economic apparatus which seems geared for nothing but global destruction in spite of all its fair words in favor of peace. I make monastic silence a protest against the lies of politicians, propagandists and agitators, and when I speak it is to deny that my faith and my Church can ever seriously be aligned with these forces of injustice and destruction.

"My life, then, must be a protest against [those who invoke their faith in support of war, racial injustice and tyranny] also, and perhaps against these most of all....

"The time has come for judgement to be passed on this history. I can rejoice in this fact, believing that the judgement will be a liberation of Christian faith from servitude to and involvement in the structures of the secular world. And that is why I think certain forms of Christian "optimism" are to be taken with reservation, in so far as they lack the genuine eschatological consciousness of the Christian vision, and concentrate upon the naive hope of merely temporal achievements — churches on the moon!

"If I say no to all these secular forces, I also say yes to all that is good in the world and in man. I say yes to all that is beautiful in nature, and in order that this may be the yes of a freedom and not of subjection, I must refuse to possess anything in the world purely as my own. I say yes to all the men and women who are my brothers and sisters in the world, but for the yes to be an assent of freedom and not of subjection, I must live so that no one of them may seem to belong to me, and that I may not belong to any of them. It is because I want to be more to them than a friend that I become, to all of them, a stranger. "

HT: Jim Forest

Don't be conformed to this age. Don't fall in step. March to a different drummer.

2011-08-29T10:44:00.002-05:00

UPDATE: the complete homily from which this was taken is posted on Tom's website here:

http://homiliessermonsharangues.blogspot.com/2011/08/burning-coal_28.html

I'm struck by Jeremiah's image of the hot burning coal in the chest and the Zen concept of MU:

"What is Mu? ... Do not believe it is the common negative symbol meaning nothing. It is not nothingness, the opposite of existence. If you really want to pass this barrier, you should feel like drinking a hot iron ball that you can neither swallow nor spit out."

From yesterday's homily by Tom Cornell, a deacon serving at St. Mary's parish in Marlboro NY:

In our first reading today we hear, “You duped me, Lord….” Another translation, the Jerusalem Bible has, “You seduced me Lord, and I let myself be seduced.” I was a grown man, 31 years old before I heard these words from the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, in October 1965. Thomas Merton read them to a small group he had called to his monastery, the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemane in Kentucky. Merton was then and remains now, 43 years after his death, the most widely read spiritual writer in the English language. He gathered leaders of the growing peace movement (A.J. Muste, Dan Berrigan, Jim Forest, John Howard Yoder, W.H Ferry and three or four others. Phil Berrigan showed up on the last day, with a case of beer.) The war in Viet Nam was just heating up. The public still supported the war but some of us felt very differently.

Merton called us to answer this question: By what right can we raise our voices against this war? Merton answered the question himself through the words of Jeremiah we just heard. To paraphrase: “You tricked me, Lord. I didn’t know what I was getting into speaking your word. I don’t want to do it anymore Lord. You’ve made me a laughing-stock. I make up my mind that I will speak for you no longer. But then it’s like a coal burning in my chest and I have to speak, to let it out.”

We did it because we had to. It was uncomfortable, even dangerous, given the temper of the times. A young friend of mine, a nineteen year old boy, had just been beaten to death on a street in Rochester for wearing the peace symbol, that’s all, the same symbol that you see everywhere now. (Graham Carey carved Ivan Johnson’s headstone on a hill in Truro, on Cape Cod, overlooking the spot where his ancestors first made landfall on the Mayflower, in 1620.) Soldiers in Viet Nam would be painting it on their helmets just three years later, when they and public opinion changed. But then, in 1965, it was another story.

We took comfort in Saint Paul’s advice we also just heard. “Do not be conformed to this age.” Don’t fall in step. March to a different drummer. “Be transformed by the renewal of your understanding so that you may judge what is God’s will, what is good, pleasing and perfect.

HT: Jim Forest

the contemplative mind

2011-08-28T07:41:00.003-05:00

Photo by Thomas Merton

"I think the contemplative mind is the most absolute assault on the secular or rational worldview, because it really is a different mind—a different point of view.

"The mind that I call the "small self” or the "false self” reads everything in terms of personal advantage, short-term effort, “What's in it for me?”—and “How will I look?”, “How will I look good?” As long as you read reality from the reference point of the small self of “how I personally feel” or “what I need or want,” you cannot get very far. The lens never opens up.

"Thus the great religions have taught that we need to change the seer much more than just telling people what to see—that is contemplation." - Fr. Richard Rohr OFM

I don't know how you change (transform) the mind other than by meditation / contemplative prayer or profound suffering. Fr. Thomas Keating says that with contemplative prayer one can find in a short time what can take 20 years in a monastery.

This is what Gerry Straub had to say this week:

"Faith, hope and love, the triptych of the spiritual life, are nurtured stillness. The art of contemplating divine truths grows out of the art of remaining still. The soul that waits on God, patiently and unhurriedly, will eventually be filled with the realization he or she is infinitely loved." - Gerry Straub

The Assumption

2011-08-15T17:30:00.001-05:00

A detail from The Assumption of the Virgin by Antonia da Corregio 1530

UPDATE: I had some qualms about posting this particular Merton quote. It's veering a little more into the dogmatic and pious (cataphatic) than I am comfortable with on louie. But there was something of the incarnational about this particular quote that included Mary (and women). That seemed important to include.

Women (and Mary) figure predominately in Merton's inner workings.

That God should assume Mary into heaven is not just a glorification of a "Mother Goddess." Quite the contrary, it is the expression of the divine love for humanity, and a very special manifestation of God's respect for God's creatures, God's desire to do honor to the beings made in God's own image, and most particularly God's respect for the body which was destined to be the temple of God's glory. If Mary is believed to be assumed into heaven, it is because we too are one day, by the grace of God, to dwell where she is. If human nature is glorified in her, it is because God desires it to be glorified in us too, and it is for this reason that the Son, taking flesh, came into the world.

In all the great mystery of Mary, then, one thing remains most clear: that of herself she is nothing, and that God has for our sakes delighted to manifest God's glory and God's love in her.
- from New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton

HT: barefoot toward the light

the bomb

2011-08-09T06:37:00.000-05:00

The Catholic Worker, September 1945
http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/daytext.cfm?TextID=554
We Go on Record

By Dorothy Day

Mr. Truman was jubilant. President Truman. True man; what a strange name, come to think of it. We refer to Jesus Christ as true God and true Man. Truman is a true man of his time in that he was jubilant. He was not a son of God, brother of Christ, brother of the Japanese, jubilating as he did. He went from table to table on the cruiser which was bringing him home from the Big Three conference, telling the great news; "jubilant" the newspapers said. Jubilate Deo. We have killed 318,000 Japanese.

That is, we hope we have killed them, the Associated Press, on page one, column one of the Herald Tribune, says. The effect is hoped for, not known. It is to be hoped they are vaporized, our Japanese brothers -- scattered, men, women and babies, to the four winds, over the seven seas. Perhaps we will breathe their dust into our nostrils, feel them in the fog of New York on our faces, feel them in the rain on the hills of Easton.

Jubilate Deo. President Truman was jubilant. We have created. We have created destruction. We have created a new element, called Pluto. Nature had nothing to do with it.

"A cavern below Columbia was the bomb's cradle," born not that men might live, but that men might be killed. Brought into being in a cavern, and then tried in a desert place, in the midst of tempest and lightning, tried out, and then again on the eve of the Feast of the Transfiguration of our Lord Jesus Christ, on a far off island in the eastern hemisphere, tried out again, this "new weapon which conceivably might wipe out mankind, and perhaps the planet itself."

"Dropped on a town, one bomb would be equivalent to a severe earthquake and would utterly destroy the place. A scientific brain trust has solved the problem of how to confine and release almost unlimited energy. It is impossible yet to measure its effects."

"We have spent two billion on the greatest scientific gamble in history and won," said President Truman jubilantly.

The papers list the scientists (the murderers) who are credited with perfecting this new weapon. One outstanding authority "who earlier had developed a powerful electrical bombardment machine called the cyclotron, was Professor O. E. Lawrence, a Nobel prize winner of the University of California. In the heat of the race to unlock the atom, he built the world's most powerful atom smashing gun, a machine whose electrical projectiles carried charges equivalent to 25,000,000 volts. But such machines were found in the end to be unnecessary. The atom of Uranium-235 was smashed with surprising ease. Science discovered that not sledgehammer blows, but subtle taps from slow traveling neutrons managed more on a tuning technique were all that were needed to disintegrate the Uranium-235 atom."

(Remember the tales we used to hear, that one note of a violin, if that note could be discovered, could collapse the Empire State Building. Remember too, that God's voice was heard not in the great and strong wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire, but "in the whistling of a gentle air.")

Scientists, army officers, great universities (Notre Dame included), and captains of industry -- all are given credit lines in the press for their work of preparing the bomb -- and other bombs, the President assures us, are in production now.

Great Britain controls the supply of uranium ore, in Canada and Rhodesia. We are making the bombs. This new great force will be used for good, the scientists assured us. And then they wiped out a city of 318,000. This was good. The President was jubilant.

Today's paper with its columns of description of the new era, the atomic era, which this colossal slaughter of the innocents has ushered in, is filled with stories covering every conceivable phase of the new discovery. Pictures of the towns and the industrial plants where the parts are made are spread across the pages. In the forefront of the town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee is a chapel, a large comfortable-looking chapel benignly settled beside the plant. And the scientists making the first tests in the desert prayed, one newspaper account said.

Yes, God is still in the picture. God is not mocked. Today, the day of this so great news, God made a madman dance and talk, who had not spoken for twenty years. God sent a typhoon to damage the carrier Hornet. God permitted a fog to obscure vision and a bomber crashed into the Empire State Building. God permits these things. We have to remember it. We are held in God's hands, all of us, and President Truman too, and these scientists who have created death, but will use it for good. He, God, holds our life and our happiness, our sanity and our health; our lives are in His hands. He is our Creator. Creator.

And as I write, Pigsie, who works in Secaucus, New Jersey, feeding hogs, and cleaning out the excrement of the hogs, who comes in once a month to find beauty and surcease and glamour and glory in the drink of the Bowery, trying to drive the hell and the smell out of his nostrils and his life, sleeps on our doorstep, in this best and most advanced and progressive of all possible worlds. And as I write, our cat, Rainbow, slinks by with a shrill rat in her jaws, out of the kitchen closet here at Mott Street. Here in this greatest of cities which covered the cavern where this stupendous discovery was made, which institutes an era of unbelievable richness and power and glory for man ….

Everyone says, "I wonder what the Pope thinks of it?" How everyone turns to the Vatican for judgement, even though they do not seem to listen to the voice there! But our Lord Himself has already pronounced judgement on the atomic bomb. When James and John (John the beloved) wished to call down fire from heaven on their enemies, Jesus said:

"You know not of what spirit you are. The Son of Man came not to destroy souls but to save." He said also, "What you do unto the least of these my brethren, you do unto me."

Note: louie louie previously marked the U. S. bombings of the Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9) HERE. Thomas Merton's poem, Original Child Bomb is HERE.

Communication is not the noise of slogans

2011-08-04T08:59:00.000-05:00

Photo by Thomas Merton
"Everything healthy, everything certain, everything holy, if we can find such things, they all need to be emphasized and articulated. For this it is necessary that there be communication between the hearts and minds of men, communication and not the noise of slogans or the repetition of cliches. Communication is becoming more and more difficult, and ... speech is in danger of perishing or being perverted in the amplified noise of beasts.... There is, it seems to me, every reason why we should attempt to cry out to one another and comfort one another, in so far as this may be possible, with the truth of Christ and also with the truth of humanism and reason. For faith cannot not be preserved if ... man is destroyed: that is to say if his humanity is utterly debased and mechanized, while he himself remains on earth as the instrument of enormous and unidentified forces like those which press us inexorably to the brink of cataclysm..."

- Thomas Merton
from a letter to Paulo Alceu Amorosa Lima in Rio de Janiero
Cold War Letters, Orbis Books, p 12

HT: Jim Forest

The Curé of Ars - St. John Vianney

2011-08-04T08:22:00.003-05:00

"After each trip to places of crushing suffering, such as Uganda and Haiti, coming home is always a difficult transition for me to make. Going from extreme need to stunning abundance is jarring. In a land of plenty we hunger for more. We have turned greed into a virtue. Our lives are fragmented and disconnected. Television and the internet have turned our interior dwellings into shanty towns. Instead of looking in, they prompt us to look outward, and we become what we gaze upon. When praying, we turn away from ourselves and turn toward God."

- Gerry Straub (from his blog today, the Feast of the Curé of Ars)

Today is the Feast of the Curé of Ars, the parish priest assigned to a forgotten farmers' village. The simplicity of his life and acceptance of his limited natural knowledge, drew people from all over France to his confessional. He spent 17 hours a day hearing confessions. It is said that he could read peoples' souls. He was a guide for the down-trodden and broken people of the world.

His body remains incorrupt.

holy stillness

2011-07-27T08:02:00.001-05:00

HT: Jim Forest

portraits of a moment

2011-07-13T10:38:00.000-05:00

Robert Lax, Photo by Hartmut Geerken

"For many years Robert Lax has refused the challenge of acceleration posed by our hectic world. Long before Virilio's critique of speed, he pitted his *slow down* against the tempo and bustle of the modern city, determined not to keep up with its frantic pace. He resisted quite consciously, if in quite private way, acting as a spanner in the works. Throughout his life he has literally trained himself to do everything as slowly as possible.
...
Thanks to this deliberate slowness, the poet has been able to capture countless precious moments in his laconic poems, episodes, fables and diary entries. These are moments outside of time, outside of our time, scintillating particles of a cycle that stretches out across our time, and that can be summoned at any moment by one and all -- which is what makes them so overwhelming for the reader and listener."
-Sigrid Hauff, "A Line in Three Circles - The Inner Biography of Robert Lax", p. 58, 2007, Bayerischer Rundfunk, Munich/Germany

longing and belonging

2011-06-25T14:19:00.001-05:00

Photo by Thomas Merton
“Each of us has to look into our dark world, recognize the forces that bind us, the blind instincts, the compulsions which, though they give the illusion of power, freedom, adulthood, ensnare us. We have to fight our way free; renounce the Dark Powers, learn to judge and act from our centre. Only then are we human and personal. This work of self-knowledge is absolutely essential.”
-Ruth Burrows
Guidelines for Mystical Prayer

This is the quote Gerry Straub uses to introduce his blog post today. He goes on to talk about his struggle to find his real self. It is profoundly honest and true. In my opinion, he's getting very close to the central insight of Contemplative Prayer. Gerry writes:

"... This stuff doesn’t come quickly or easily, which is why we don’t bother with it. I devoted a few pages of The Sun and Moon Over Assisi to explaining Merton’s ideas on the true and false self stuff. Mostly I quoted sources who understood. I had deceived myself into thinking I understood. In truth, my mind kinda got it – but it was just another theory neatly tucked away in a dingy corner of my brain. Slowly, I am beginning to “see” it with different eyes.

Thomas Merton wrote so clearly about deep spiritual things that we think we get it. The fact is his understanding was hidden in his words, which only point the way, showing us the right direction. But we must walk alone. Only God can teach me how to find God. And that reality is why so many true contemplatives are so reluctant to talk about their inner life. They cannot teach us anything – aside from a few techniques to help us get started..."

(Read all of it HERE)

I've written about Gerry Straub - a documentary filmmaker and award winning author - before on this blog (HERE and HERE). One day last fall, out of the blue, Gerry called me on the phone and we had a long talk about our similar interests and quests. Such things can happen when you mention someone on your blog. Gerry told me that if I never needed anything, I should call him. I haven't called him yet, but knowing he is here among us gives me great comfort.

the courage to be simple

2011-06-21T07:57:00.002-05:00

It takes more courage than we imagine to be perfectly simple with other men. Our frankness is often spoiled by a hidden barbarity, born of fear.

False sincerity has much to say, because it is afraid. True candor can afford to be silent. It does not need to face an anticipated attack. Anything it may have to defend can be defended with perfect simplicity.

-- Thomas Merton.

No Man is an Island (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955) pages 194-5
also in A Merton Reader, ed. by Thomas P. McDonnell, (New York: Image Books, 1989) page 123

Of Gods and Men - Facing a Goodbye

2011-05-31T15:01:00.002-05:00

The French Film, "Of Gods and Men" is a portrait of the Trappist monks living at Tibhirine, a remote monastery in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria, who were kidnapped and murdered in 1996. The story is told very simply by actors who completely disappear into their roles.

Below is the text of a letter written by the abbot shortly before the kidnapping.

Testament of Dom Christian de Chergé

(opened on Pentecost Sunday, May 26, 1996)

Facing a GOODBYE....

If it should happen one day - and it could be today -
that I become a victim of the terrorism which now seems ready to engulf
all the foreigners living in Algeria,
I would like my community, my Church and my family
to remember that my life was GIVEN to God and to this country.
I ask them to accept the fact that the One Master of all life
was not a stranger to this brutal departure.
I would ask them to pray for me:
for how could I be found worthy of such an offering?
I ask them to associate this death with so many other equally violent ones
which are forgotten through indifference or anonymity.
My life has no more value than any other.
Nor any less value.
In any case, it has not the innocence of childhood.
I have lived long enough to know that I am an accomplice in the evil
which seems to prevail so terribly in the world,
even in the evil which might blindly strike me down.
I should like, when the time comes, to have a moment of spiritual clarity
which would allow me to beg forgiveness of God
and of my fellow human beings,
and at the same time forgive with all my heart the one who would strike me down.
I could not desire such a death.
It seems to me important to state this.
I do not see, in fact, how I could rejoice
if the people I love were indiscriminately accused of my murder.
It would be too high a price to pay
for what will perhaps be called, the "grace of martyrdom"
to owe it to an Algerian, whoever he might be,
especially if he says he is acting in fidelity to what he believes to be Islam.
I am aware of the scorn which can be heaped on the Algerians indiscriminately.
I am also aware of the caricatures of Islam which a certain Islamism fosters.
It is too easy to soothe one's conscience
by identifying this religious way with the fundamentalist ideology of its extremists.
For me, Algeria and Islam are something different: it is a body and a soul.
I have proclaimed this often enough, I think, in the light of what I have received from it.
I so often find there that true strand of the Gospel
which I learned at my mother's knee, my very first Church,
precisely in Algeria, and already inspired with respect for Muslim believers.
Obviously, my death will appear to confirm
those who hastily judged me naïve or idealistic:
"Let him tell us now what he thinks of his ideals!"
But these persons should know that finally my most avid curiosity will be set free.
This is what I shall be able to do, God willing:
immerse my gaze in that of the Father
to contemplate with him His children of Islam
just as He sees them, all shining with the glory of Christ,
the fruit of His Passion, filled with the Gift of the Spirit
whose secret joy will always be to establish communion
and restore the likeness, playing with the differences.
For this life lost, totally mine and totally theirs,
I thank God, who seems to have willed it entirely
for the sake of that JOY in everything and in spite of everything.
In this THANK YOU, which is said for everything in my life from now on,
I certainly include you, friends of yesterday and today,
and you, my friends of this place,
along with my mother and father, my sisters and brothers and their families,
You are the hundredfold granted as was promised!
And also you, my last-minute friend, who will not have known what you were doing:
Yes, I want this THANK YOU and this GOODBYE to be a "GOD-BLESS" for you, too,
because in God's face I see yours.
May we meet again as happy thieves in Paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both.
AMEN ! INCHALLAH !

Algiers, 1st December 1993

Tibhirine, 1st January 1994

Christian +

contemplation is an abiding silence

2011-05-18T12:59:00.001-05:00

"Well, I think the purpose of the monastic life in the modern world is to show that we don’t need a purpose. The purpose of life is life, and you are to be just to be. Everybody measures their importance by how useful they are, so you need to shatter that. You know, somebody has to come along now and then just say listen, you know, that’s not it. That’s not what life is." - Brother Paul

JUDY VALENTE, correspondent: The lumber shed at the Abbey of Gethsemani in northern Kentucky. It’s late February. Each night at 8:00 Brother Paul Quenon walks to the shed, as he has every night for 20 years. He goes around back, where he finds his mattress. This is where he will sleep—outdoors, no matter the weather.

BROTHER PAUL QUENON (The Abbey of Gethsemani): I can’t be a full-time hermit, but I can be a night-time hermit, and there’s something about waking up in the middle of the night, and there’s nobody around. There’s a kind of an edge of solitude that you cannot experience in any other way.

VALENTE: Here, a monk seeks to live every moment in the presence of God, in unity with God. Brother Paul came to Gethsemani 52 years ago. He was 17, inspired by reading the autobiography of the famous Trappist monk Thomas Merton, who introduced many Americans to the contemplative life. Merton would eventually become his spiritual director and would encourage Brother Paul to write. Thomas Merton said monks and poets are people who live on the margins of society. Brother Paul decided to become both. He says monks and poets remind us to pay attention to the world around us, to focus on what’s essential.

Read the rest HERE ...

From Religion & Ethics Newsweekly

does art have anything to do with life? (Robert Lax on Ad Reinhardt)

2011-04-14T12:43:00.003-05:00

Robert Lax, Photo by Hartmut Geerken

During the early 1950s there was a big debate going on about whether or not art had anything to do with life. Ad Reinhardt, artist and friend of Merton and Lax, claimed that "art is art is art", and that if people wanted nature, they should take a walk.

Lax admired Reinhardt and the clarity and purity that Rienhardt tried to achieve in his art. He considered Ad's paintings as objects for meditation. But he had his doubts about the idea that art should have nothing to do with life.

I'm beginning to think
r[einhardt] was wrong

not r[einhardt], but an idea i had
of him that i practically
worshipped

that said life was the
opposite of art

& art was the opposite
of life

& proud of it

but i think life
has something
to do with art

& it's just a matter
of finding

the special point

at which the two of them
get together.

- Robert Lax, Timeless Painting, Ad Reinhardt (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie) 1985, p.85

Lax motto

2011-04-09T12:06:00.000-05:00

Robert Lax, Photo by Hartmut Geerken

A Lax motto that is perfectly out of keeping with our times ...

opportunity
knocks
but
once

sit still

it will go away

- Robert Lax

"words stand between silence and silence"

2011-04-06T08:36:00.000-05:00

The solitary life, being silent, clears away the smoke-screen of words that man has laid down between his mind and things. In solitude we remain face to face with the naked being of things. And yet we find that the nakedness of reality which we have feared, is neither a matter of terror nor for shame. It is clothed in the friendly communion of silence, and this silence is related to love. The world our words have attempted to classify, to control and even to despise (because they could not contain it) comes close to us, for silence teaches us to know reality by respecting it where words have defiled it.

When we have lived long enough alone with the reality around us, our veneration will learn how to bring forth a few good words about it from the silence which is the mother of Truth.

Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. Between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.

-- Thomas Merton
Thoughts in Solitude
first published in 1958 by Farrar, Strauss, Giroux
in early editions, pages 85-6, in more recent editions pages 82-3

mental and emotional rubbish

2011-03-29T12:02:00.000-05:00

The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes of all political and social life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning we cannot begin to see. Unless we see, we cannot think.

-- Thomas Merton
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New York: Image) p 77

This quote really hitting home today. HT to Jim Forest for passing it on to me.

Catherine de Hueck Doherty

2011-03-24T13:42:00.002-05:00

Photo of Catherine de Hueck Doherty by Merton, 1941

Merton first met Catherine de Hueck Doherty when she spoke at St. Bonaventure University in Olean, N.Y., in 1941. He had heard about her work in Friendship House (FH) when he lived in New York City, but he had never met her. On that very evening after hearing her talk, he was inspired to ask if he could come to Harlem. Catherine said yes. (How many others had said they wanted to come and never did!) He spent “[two] weeks of evenings,” as he put it, at Friendship House in Harlem. He met Catherine again later that same year at St. Bonaventure when she came for another talk.

The following passage is from Seven Story Mountain, where Merton is reflecting on his first encounter with Catherine:

“The Baroness was born a Russian. She had been a young girl at the time of the October Revolution. She had seen half of her family shot, she had seen priests fall under the bullets of the Reds, and she had escaped from Russia the way it is done in the movies, but with all the misery and hardship which the movies do not show, and none of the glamour which is their specialty.

“The experiences she had gone through, instead of destroying her faith, intensified and deepened it until the Holy Ghost planted fortitude in the midst of her soul like an unshakable rock. I never saw anyone so calm, so certain, so peaceful in her absolute confidence in God.

“Catherine de Hueck is a person in every way big: and the bigness is not merely physical: it comes from the Holy Ghost dwelling constantly within her, and moving her in all that she does." - Seven Story Mountain, pp. 342-343

the ferlinghetti connection, part 2

2011-03-24T08:34:00.001-05:00

Into the Interior

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I am your whispered voice
your inside voice
your interior voice
your unheard voice
your unspoken voice
your unvoiced voice
your unspeakable voice
I am your heart's voice and your heartless voice
your deepest voice
under layers of living & speaking
the voice of your buried life
your invisible life
your silent life
your unknown life
your unopened life
your unrealized life
the undiscovered life that no one sees
not even your lover
not even yourself

If you will listen to me
if you will lend me the ear
of your mind
and of your bent heart
if you will heed my whisperings...
heed my whisperings...
heed my whisperings...
heed my whisperings...

* * *
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
How to Paint Sunlight: Lyric Poems & Others (1997-2000)
New York: New Directions

See the ferlinghetti connection (part 1)

a monk as a bird is a bird - Mahanambrata Brahmachari - a messenger from another world

2011-03-06T09:39:00.003-05:00

Mahanambrata Brahmachari was a soft-spoken Hindu scholar who offered early and important intellectual encouragement to both Merton and Lax.

Robert Lax never tried to be like others. Did he have any models? He had the ability to learn from others. Open, unbiased, he appears to have always discovered in others whatever it was he needed in his search for self.

Important for him was his meeting with Brahmachari, the young Hindu monk who set out on foot from Calcutta to the Ecumenical World Congress in the USA, and arrived two years late in 1938.

"A monk as a bird is a bird," Lax described him.

In complete disregard of the regulations of their hall of residence, Lax and his friend Thomas Merton put him up for several months in their rooms at Columbia University.

Brahmachari observed American society with the eyes of a stranger, and thus unwittingly altered the way the two students saw things. They began to question much that they had previously taken for granted. Brahmachari's remarks were free of any sarcasm or irony; he did not evaluate, but simply noted and burst out laughing - which was simply an expression of his utter astonishment at the way he saw people living their lives there. Dressed in a white robe, a pea-yellow shawl, a yellow turban embroidered in red with prayers, and his blue sneakers, he was a messenger from another world. The fact that Brahmachari hadn't a cent to his name and despite this didn't feel the slightest worry or care, but instead radiated a phenomenal calm, made a deep impression the the two friends Lax and Merton. He had such a deep inner repose and acted so confidently that it seemed he had a direct link with heaven and the world lay at his feet. His sincerity and warmth were like signs from the higher sphere. Brahmachari was not the slightest bit bothered about politics. Lax had the feeling, as he says, that Brahmachari was in touch with something like a timeless world in which we all exist and in which, if we were to do nothing but live a life of quietude, rectitude, and goodness, everything else would come of its own accord. For Brahmachari, the life of the spirit was the only possible choice. He lived in the moment, in the present moment. Love and devotion - Brahmachari exemplified his message. He was, as Robert Lax says, a wonderfully gentle person. There can be no doubt that Brahmachari had a lasting influence or Robert Lax's [and Merton's] human dealings.

- Sigrid Hauff, A Line in Three Circles - The Inner Life of Robert Lax, 2007

During Brahmachari's years in the US he kept a diary, much of which has been lost. However here is an entry he made when he first met Merton (Mr. Tom Martin) and Lax. The rest of the diary entries can be found HERE.

New York-Wednesday, May 25. Taxi to 135 madison Avenue-the factory of Seymour's father. Leave one passage of (Shree Murti). Take bus to Columbia. Meet Seymour's roommate, Mr. Robert Lx. To Philosophy library reading Karl Marx. Meet Mr. Tom Martin. Three of us go out for lunch after waiting an hour for Seymour hoping he would come. After lunch they take me to one of their girl student friend, Dunny Eilin-her home in Panama. happy visit with her. ...

When he was in Asia, Merton made attempts to locate Brahmachari. Brahmachari died in 1999 in Calcutta at the age of 95. The NY Times obituary is here.

am i supposed to wish for something?

2011-03-05T09:30:00.001-05:00

Robert Lax, Photo by Hartmut Geerken

Lax never paid much attention to having his writings published. During his earlier years he wondered what exactly he was supposed to do, working as a tutor, on the radio, and writing film scripts in Hollywood. But eventually he settled into doing just what was in front of him.

what do you most
wish for
in all this world?

am i supposed
to wish
for something?

- Lax, episodes Pendo/Verlag 1983, p. 69

whatever you have
to say
will get itself
said

don't worry

who worries?

that's all i'm
telling
you:
don't

-Lax, journal A, Pendo/Verlag, 1986 p. 36

we are wanderers

2011-03-03T10:08:00.002-05:00

(Robert Lax hands) Photo by Hartmut Geerken

For we are all wanderers in the
earth, and pilgrims. We have no
permanent habitat here. The migration
of people for foraging & exploiting can
become, with grace, in (latter days)
a traveling circus. Our tabernacle must
in its nature be a temporary tabernacle.

We are wanderers in the earth, but
only a few of us in each generation
have discovered the life of charity, the
living from day to day, receiving
our gifts gratefully through grace,
and rendering them, multiplied
through grace, to the giver.

-- Robert Lax, mogador's book 1992 68/70

The Annunciation

2010-12-23T07:13:00.003-05:00


The Annuncation, by Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1898, oil on canvas

When the angel spoke, God awoke in the heart of this girl of Nazareth and moved within her like a giant. He stirred and opened His eyes and her soul and she saw that, in containing Him, she contained the world besides.

The Annunciation was not so much a vision as an earthquake in which God moved the universe and unsettled the spheres, and the beginning and the end of all things came before her in her deepest heart.

And far beneath the movement of this silent cataclysm Mary slept in the infinite tranquility of God, and God was a child curled up who slept in her and her veins were flooded with His wisdom which is night, which is starlight, which is silence.

And her whole being was embraced in Him whom she embraced and they became tremendous silence.

-- Thomas Merton
The Ascent to Truth (Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1951, p 317)

HT to Jim Forest

homeless

2010-12-06T16:00:00.000-05:00

Photo by Thomas Merton

From Gerry Straub's blog:

In 2000, I spent the first week of Advent alone in Thomas Merton’s hermitage on the grounds of Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky. How I was given that chance is a long story, which I shall not burden you with. But here is a little something I wrote exactly ten years ago today.

Wednesday, December 6, 2000 – 10:40am, Merton’s Hermitage. After breakfast, I sat quietly in front of the fireplace. The house was really cold and I had not started the furnace, thinking I would wait until later this afternoon. After meditating for about 20 minutes, a picture flashed across my mind: the interior of an abandoned building in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, where squatters had set fire to the staircase to keep warm during a bitter cold night. I had been in the building – and many more like it – while making the documentary on the St. Francis Inn. One day, Fr. Francis Pompei, OFM found a young man in the abandoned building. He was bundled up against the cold night. His name was Efrem and he had been homeless for about a month. He said, “It’s rough.” A towering example of an understatement. Sitting alone in Merton’s hermitage – living in “rough” conditions – I’m reminded of the plight of the poor who live in far, far worse conditions because of injustice and not out of seeking a “spiritual” experience. We cannot walk toward God and turn our backs on our suffering brothers and sisters at the same time. If you are reading these words in the comfort of a home, put the book down and go show God’s mercy and love to someone who does not have a home. Get up. Do it now. To forget the poor is to forget God.

“It is the hour for prayer; if you hear the poor calling you, mortify yourself and leave God for God, although you must do everything you can not to omit your prayer, for that is what keeps you united to God; and as long as this union lasts you have nothing to fear.”
-St. Vincent de Paul

Uncommon Vision

2010-12-02T12:56:00.005-05:00

Morgan Atkinson has produced a documentary on the remarkable life of John Howard Griffin. Griffin figured significantly in Merton's life, and Merton in Griffin's. This blog includes a collection of posts reflecting on Griffin's life, spirituality, and art (as if they could be viewed separately!).

This is the description of the documentary from Atkinson's home page:

Uncommon Vision: The Life and Times of John Howard Griffin is Morgan Atkinson's documentary on the remarkable life of a son of the American South, who became a citizen of the world and stirred the conscience of a nation.

John Howard Griffin is best known as the white man who in 1959 disguised himself as a black man and then traveled anonymously through the heart of Dixie. From his experiences he wrote “Black Like Me”, a groundbreaking best seller that today stands as a testament to Griffin’s moral commitment and a document of one of the more extraordinary events of the Civil Rights era.

“Uncommon Vision” focuses on Griffin’s social activism but will also examine how a spiritual commitment led him from a segregated childhood in Fort Worth to fighting with the French Underground, sustained him during ten years of blindness incurred by war injuries and inspired him during a prolific creative life as a writer/photographer.

It’s an inspiring, entertaining and edifying story. Studs Terkel, one of the great chroniclers of 20th century American culture and a frequent interviewer of Griffin, summed him up thusly.
“John Howard Griffin was one of the most remarkable people I have ever encountered … He was just one of those guys that comes along once or twice in a century and lifts the hearts of the rest of us.”
Studs Terkel

Here is a video. I remember being fascinated with the book, Black Like Me, when I was a child. I look forward to seeing this documentary:

Click HERE to listen to an America Magazine podcast about the documentary.

an advent thought

2010-12-02T08:02:00.000-05:00

“A waiting person is a patient person. The word ‘patience’ means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us. Impatient people are always expecting the real thing to happen somewhere else and therefore want to go elsewhere. The moment is empty. But patient people dare to stay where they are. Patient living means to live actively in the present and wait there. Waiting, then, is not passive. It involves nurturing the moment, as a mother nurtures the child that is growing in her womb.” -Henri Nouwen

Dorothy Day - November 8, 1897 – November 29, 1980

2010-11-30T08:17:00.001-05:00

"Dorothy Day is one of the greatest and most significant Catholics of the twentieth century. Today is the 30th anniversary of her death."

- From an essay by Fr. Stephen Wang, which can be found here.

Robert Ellsburg, in a short life, says of Dorothy:

"The enigma of Dorothy Day was her ability to reconcile her radical social positions (she called herself an anarchist as well as a pacifist) with a traditional and even conservative piety. Her commitment to poverty, obedience, and chastity was as firm as any nun’s. But she remained thoroughly immersed in the secular world with all the “precarity” and disorder that came with life among the poor."

Relics Merton took to Asia

2010-11-23T08:01:00.000-05:00

St. Charbel

This interesting tidbit came via an email from Jim Forest:

An interesting detail about Merton's trip to Asia in 1968 is that he carried with him a number of relics of various saints. Thanks to Paul Pearson I have this list:

St. Bede
St. Thomas of Canterbury
St. Teresa of Jesus
St. Peter Damian
St. Bruno
St. Romuald
St. Nicholas of Flue
St. Charbel

Paul writes: "Over the years a number of them were sent to him by Sr. Therese Lentfoehr, though the one of St. Charbel came from Sr. Mary Luke Tobin. (In a letter to Therese – Dec. ’65 – Merton mentions that he buried a second class relic of Charbel in the foundations of the hermitage when it was being built!)"

HT: Jim Forest and Paul Pearson

the Lax cottage

2010-10-15T10:01:00.002-05:00

"When Bob was living by himself at the cottage on Rock City Hill during the late 1930s, his older sister Gladys drove up to see him, taking supplies and checking his well-being. She told him she’d had a dream the previous night that people from all around the world would someday come to visit this place. They laughed about it, but he remembered because Gladio didn’t usually tell her dreams and it was such an unusual dream about such an unlikely place. Nothing momentous had ever happened there, except a group of college boys and girls, mostly from Columbia University, had spent summer college-student time, drinking beer, writing novels (one took place entirely under water), building tree-houses, wandering the woods, and luxuriating in a free house, thanks to Lax’s brother-in-law Benji who probably didn’t give it a thought, except to pay fire insurance premiums.

"One of Bob’s Columbia pals wrote from New York, July 29, 1938: “Lax, you don’t write. Sir, are you bogged up in your cabin? Are you walled in, is there no mail service, is it eating and drinking and feasting all day, is it watching the birds fly about and no thought for friends? Is it hatching some egg?” - concluding the letter, “Listen, if I find some guy with a car like Joe Roberts we both might come up to Olean this end of August, if you would say so, and if Benji and Gladio would not be awfully sore at putting up one guy twice in one summer” - signed “Merton".

"In 1948, The Seven Story Mountain was published and the public got a look at how time had been spent at that cabin, and to the astonishment of the author especially, the book made the best seller list, and exposed how college students spend their summer: drinking beer, writing novels, wandering in the woods, enjoying a free pad thanks to benevolent and caring relatives, while they wonder aloud about life and what they were going to do with it. Nothing unusual except three of the guys turn out to be world-class writers: Robert Lax, Edward Rice, and Thomas Merton." [Artist, Ad Reihnardt, also spent time at the cottage.]

excepted from an essay by Jack Kelly, “Robert Lax - Coming Home”

Last week I was in Olean NY, perusing the Lax archives at St. Bonaventure University. I knew that the cottage was in disrepair and that the property had been sold. But I also knew that it was high on a hill, that there was a radio tower on the property and that it was about 5 miles outside of Olean on the way to Rock City. My sister was with me, and with our eyes on the radio towers we followed our noses and happened upon the cottage. It was partially hidden from the road, heavily fortified with no trespassing signs and road blocks, but unmistakably, the Lax cottage. Talk about a trip back in time.

Lax resting place

2010-10-08T14:57:00.001-05:00

I did find the Bob Lax's gravesite today, on a hill overlooking the St. Bonaventure University campus in Olean NY. It is a simple small stone, flush with the ground, and reads:

slow
boat

calm
riv
er

qui
et

land
ing

Robert Lax 1915 + 2000

This is the view down the hill from his grave site:

two quotes to ponder

2010-09-20T12:22:00.003-05:00

"What you thought you came for is only a shell, a husk of meaning from which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled…the purpose is beyond the end you figured and is altered in fulfillment." -- T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

"When you have been praised a little and loved a little I will take away all your gifts and all your love and all your praise and you will be utterly forgotten and abandoned and you will be nothing, a dead thing, a rejection. And in that day you will begin to possess the solitude you have so long desired. And your solitude will bear immense fruit in the souls of men [and women] you will never see on earth.

"You shall taste the true solitude of my anguish and my poverty and I shall lead you into the high places of my joy and you shall die in me and find all things in my mercy which has created you for this end…'that you may become the brother [sister] of God and learn to know the Christ of the burnt men.' " -- Thomas Merton, Seven Story Mountain, page 462, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999

HT: Gone Walkabout

Jubilate Deo, omnis terra

2010-09-20T06:08:00.001-05:00

Merton was quite involved with a remarkable journal called "Jubilee", which was founded by his godfather, Ed Rice. The magazine's "roving editor" was his dear friend, Bob Lax. I have explored Jubilee, which was published from 1953 - 1967, on this blog HERE, with several photos of the magazine.

A comprehensive essay about Jubilee by Mary Ann Rivera is on the web:

Jubilee: a magazine of the church and her people: toward a Vatican II ecclesiology

Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, Fall, 2007 by Mary Anne Rivera

"Jubilee magazine was a public proclamation of "Jubilate Deo, omnis terra "(Shout with joy to God, all the earth). For its founder, Edward Rice, the magazine proclaimed the "cheerfulness and joy" of everyday life and was a concrete expression of the believers' experience of God."

HT: to Jim Forest

how to be alone

2010-08-11T04:04:00.001-05:00

This remarkable and whimsical video captures the joy of contemplative awareness and solitude.

The Shrine to the Little Flower - St. Bonaventure University

2010-08-08T08:41:00.004-05:00

Wandering around the St. Bonaventure University campus yesterday, I happened upon the Shrine to St. Theresa of the Divine Child of Jesus, the Little Flower.

I'm pretty sure this is the shrine before which Thomas Merton was praying when he received the message that he was to join the Trappists.

Update: This is from a brochure showing the Merton places on the St. Bonaventure campus:

St. Therese’s shrine is also known as the shrine of the “Little Flower.” It was at this shrine that Thomas Merton prayed for guidance one evening. “You show me what to do. If I get into the monastery, I will be your monk. Now show me what to do.” It was then he imagined he heard the Trappist bells of Gethsemani monastery which he had visited the previous Easter. Soon afterward he left St. Bonaventure and joined the Trappists in Louisville, Kentucky.

And there is an error in that entry. The Trappist monastery which Merton joined is not in Louisville. Our Lady of Gethsemani monastery is in Nelson County, Kentucky, at least 45 miles from Louisville. I think that the official post office for Gethsemani is Nerinx, Ky. The nearest towns are New Haven and Bardstown KY.

Update 2, 8/24/2010 from Gabrielle's comments:

... It's November 28, 1941. Merton is anxious and experiencing many conflicts in his mind. He finally decides to go and talk to Fr. Philotheus, but he can't get up the courage to go see him right away. "So I pray to Saint Theresa, in the grove. While I am praying to her the question becomes clear: all I want to know is, do I have a chance to be a priest after all. I don't want him to argue for or against the Trappists. I know I want to be a Trappist... I want to be a priest - but I am told there is an impediment [note: what the Franciscans told him, re his having a child]. While I am praying to her, Saint Therese of the Child Jesus, it is like hearing the bells in the tower, ringing for Matins in the middle of the night. I walk through the grove saying she will help me to be her Trappist - Theresa's Trappist, at Gethsemani."

He finally got up the courage to talk to Fr. Philotheus who gave his opinion immediately that canonically there was no impediment to Merton's being a priest, and advised him to take a retreat at Gethsemani during the upcoming Christmas vacation.

He truly loved St. Therese (he was "knocked out" by the story of her life), but not so much the typical statues of her: "...the scandal of cheap, molasses-art and gorgonzola angels that surrounds the cultus of this great saint." [Oct. 8, 1941]

I took this info from "Run to the Mountain. The Journals of Thomas Merton, Vol. 1"

peacemaking - loving your enemy

2010-08-03T08:59:00.001-05:00

"Here we touch one of the greatest dangers that face peacemakers: that peacemakers themselves become the victims of the evil forces they are trying to overcome. The same fear of "the enemy" that leads warmakers to war can begin to affect the peacemaker who sees the warmaker as "the enemy." Words of anger and hostility can gradually enter into the language of the peacemaker. Even the sense of urgency and emergency that motivates the arms race can become the driving force behind the peacemaker. Then indeed the strategy of war and the strategy of peace have become the same, and peacemaking has lost its heart.

"One of the reasons why so many people have developed strong reservations about the peace movement is precisely that they do not see the peace they seek in the peacemakers themselves. Often what they see are fearful and angry people trying to convince others of the urgency of their protest. The tragedy is that peacemakers often reveal more of the demons they are fighting than of the peace they want to bring about.

"The words of Jesus go right to the heart of our struggle: "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who treat you badly" (Lk 6: 27-28). The more I reflect on these words, the more I consider them to be the test for peacemakers. What my enemies deserve is not my anger, rejection, resentment, or disdain, but my love. Spiritual guides throughout history have said that love for the enemy is the cornerstone of the message of Jesus and the core of holiness."

-- Henri J. M. Nouwen in “Peacework”

an integrated conscience

2010-08-02T07:47:00.002-05:00

"one woman i know has sat in and been arrested at both abortion clinics and the pentagon. thus enraging someone in both places. her crime: an integrated conscience."- Daniel Berrigan

the contemplative stance

2010-07-31T06:35:00.000-05:00

"Contemplation becomes a way of life. I don’t like to think of it so much as something I do, but something I am; so I often use the phrase “the contemplative stance.” It’s a way of living, moving, and being in this world. The very word means “to see.”

"I fully admit that we don’t live all of our twenty-four hours there. The world keeps pulling us back into our false and small self. “Put on this hat. Attach to this identity. Take on this hurt. Put on this self-importance,” we say to ourselves. It’s all right as long as we know how to take it back off again, and rather quickly, if possible. “Who was I before I was hurt?” is your original face, your true identity in God, your own “immaculate conception.” We must all crawl our way back to such innocence and such freedom."

- Fr. Richard Rohr OFM, Adapted from Contemplative Prayer (CD)

what is your relationship with silence?

2010-07-29T08:14:00.001-05:00

"As a rule, most people are afraid of silence. That’s our major barrier to prayer and to depth. Silence and words are related. Words that don’t come out of silence probably don’t say much. They probably are more an unloading than a communicating.

"Yet good words can also feed silence. But even the word of God doesn’t bear a great deal of fruit—it doesn’t really break open the heart—unless it’s tasted and chewed, unless it’s felt and suffered and enjoyed at a level deeper than words. If you look for the citations of Mary Magdalene in the Gospels, she acts, waits, listens, and asks, and hardly ever “says.”

"If I had to advise one thing for spiritual growth, it would be silence.

- Fr. Richard Rohr OFM

The Gerard Manley Hopkins Connection

2010-07-28T15:09:00.002-05:00

I got this passage about Merton's conversion to Catholicism in an email today from Jim Forest. Today is the birthday of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I thought it was interesting, but deleted it after I read it. Then I kept musing about it throughout the day. Merton's conversion to Catholicism is amazing (almost miraculous) - it was while reading a biography of Hopkins that it became absolutely clear to Merton he must become a Catholic. I decided that I wanted this insight into Merton's conversion to be part of the louie collection.

An extract from “Living With Wisdom: A Biography of Thomas Merton” by Jim Forest:

... All the internal contradictions of the society in which Merton lived were converging within him. He could see that "my likes or dislikes, beliefs or disbeliefs meant absolutely nothing in the external, political order. I was just an individual, and the individual had ceased to count.... I would probably soon become a number on the list of those to be drafted. I would get a piece of metal with my number on it ... so as to help out the circulation of red-tape that would necessarily follow the disposal of my remains."

In the midst of such dark thoughts another important book landed in Merton's life, G.F. Leahy's biography of the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, a convert to Catholicism who later became a Jesuit priest. Merton was studying Hopkins for a doctoral thesis he never completed. Sitting in his room on West 114th Street on a wet fall day, Merton started reading a chapter that described Hopkins's journey to Catholicism while a student at Oxford in 1866.

"All of a sudden," Merton recalled, "something began to stir within me, something began to push me, to prompt me. It was a movement that spoke like a voice. ‘What are you waiting for?' it said. ‘Why are you sitting here? Why do you still hesitate? You know what you ought to do? Why don't you do it?'

"I stirred in the chair. I lit a cigarette, looked out the window at the rain, tried to shut the voice up. ‘Don't act on your impulses,' I thought. ‘This is crazy. This is not rational. Read your book.'"

He tried to press on with Hopkins's life, but the inner voice only renewed its appeal: "It's useless to hesitate any longer. Why don't you get up and go?" He read another few sentences about Hopkins's conversion, and then came his own moment of consent. "I could bear it no longer. I put down the book, and got into my raincoat, and started down the stairs. I went out into the street. I crossed over, and walked along by the gray wooden fence, towards Broadway, in the light rain. And then everything inside me began to sing."

Nine blocks away was Corpus Christi and its presbytery. As it happened, its pastor, Father Ford, was just returning.

"Father," Merton asked, "may I speak to you about something?"

"Yes, sure, come into the house."

They sat in the parlor.

"Father, I want to become a Catholic."

Father Ford gave him three books to read and arranged for Merton to return for instruction two evenings a week.

The news of his impending baptism (officially a "provisional baptism," as Merton had been baptized in a Protestant church near Prades when he was an infant) was broken to Bob Lax with a frisbee-like toss of his hat. "I remember the moment," said Lax, "because he'd never before, and never since, thrown a hat in my direction." On November 18, 1938, Merton was baptized.

"What do you ask from God's Church," Merton was asked. "Faith!" "What does faith bring you?" "Life everlasting."

Witnessing the rite of passage were four friends, three of them Jews: Bob Lax, Sy Freedgood, and Bob Gerdy. Only his godfather, Ed Rice, was Catholic.

Merton entered a confessional for the first time, worried that the young priest sitting on the other side of the partition might be shocked to hear some of the events and habits that were about to be recounted. "But one by one, species by species, as best I could, I tore out all those sins by their roots, like teeth. Some of them were hard."

Baptized and absolved, for the first time he was not only present at Mass but was able to receive communion. "Now I had entered into the everlasting movement of that gravitation which is the very life and spirit of God ... goodness without end.... He called out to me from His own immense depths."

Here is a link to the Writer's Almanac Entry today about Gerard Manley Hopkins.

"... He is not waiting for anything. He is there."

2010-07-13T07:48:00.001-05:00

From 1993 to 1999, two uncommon film-makers, Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel, spent several weeks every year with Robert Lax on Patmos where they developed a long-standing friendship with the poet and collaborated with him on several film projects. I have no doubt that Lax, who wrote screenplays in his earlier years, was as much a part of the creative endeavor as the men who held the cameras. A large amount of video commentary about Lax was accumulated.

There is no commentary in these films, nor is there any story. It is just the present.

In an essay, “A Window on the Word”, Michael Philipp describes Three Windows: Hommage a Robert Lax, a video installation produced by Humbert and Penzel after Lax's death, which attempts to approach a way of life and a philosophy with visual and aural media.

Here are a few quotes from that essay:

"He does not hurry and bustle about, his activity is not purposeful or directed towards some end, but concentrates on what can be grasped in daily life. He has no commission to carry out, no deadline to meet, no plan to observe. His creative will is confined to the construction or words. He has the equilibrium of the well-informed, the peace of experience, the composure of a man who has arrived, even when he is in a train or on a ferry. He misses nothing. He is not waiting for anything. He is there."

"We see the simple life of his hermitage, the loner’s withdrawal from the world, the outsider’s retreat , monastic, Spartan, clear-cut, yet it is also a world that can be symbolically surveyed. The symbols of everyday life, concrete, unspectacular, objective: a hat tilted at an angle on the back of the chair; a stick leaning against the door; a spoon on the table - the life of objects and life lived with those objects, the immediacy of handling them."

"Beside and in front of the symbols of the phenomena that become metaphors in the film stands the direct, the immediate and elementary: sea, house, mountain, bay - images like concepts: they show something, they explain nothing. They show what is ordinary, just as what is said is what is meant; there are no abstractions in these images or in the text, nothing sensational, nothing didactic, no secret. The only revelation is that life is the message, poetry is its medium, the word that was in the beginning is its element."

"The poet speaks: not to the camera, he does not need the camera. Nor does it trouble him either, he simply ignores it. It accompanies him - unobtrusively but intensively - not he lives without it. The poet speaks to himself, but he does not speak of himself; he speaks of the world, his world. He confesses to no belief, he is an observer; he does not describe, he names. His poems are short, clear, pointed; they are polar rather than dialectical, their subtlety does not lie in synthesis; they link opposites without neutralizing them, they create relationships:

Not
from a
bove

But
from
with
in.

At Thomas Merton's Hermitage

2010-07-07T11:15:00.001-05:00

photo by Thomas Merton

This is too good not to share.

Brian has sent a link to an article in Image Magazine, "At Thomas Merton's Hermitage". Franciscan priest, Fr. Murray Bodo, spends 6 days in the spring of 1995 at Merton's hermitage at Gethsemani. The recounting of his contemplative explorations in Merton's space is profoundly insightful for those who seek a more silent and solitary balance to contemporary living and who like Merton lore.

For example, I found it intriguing to see what Merton had on his bookshelf as he left for Asia:

On the table rest a few books I’ve pulled off the shelf from the original collection Merton had here when he left for the Far East in 1968: The Portable Thoreau, The Mirror of Simple Souls by an unknown French mystic of the thirteenth century, Early Fathers from the Philokalia, Western Mysticism, The Mediaeval Mystics of England, The Flight from God by Max Picard, The Ancrene Riwle, The Book of the Poor in Spirit by a Friend of God (fourteenth century), A Guide to Rhineland Mysticism, A Treasury of Russian Spirituality, The Teaching of SS. Augustine, Gregory, and Bernard.

Or, the way the way that time alone awakens one to the simple clarity of just being alive:

"... I putter about the hermitage, make the bed, wash the breakfast dishes, sweep the porch; and something begins to order itself inside me as I order my external world. The ordering and puttering become a kind of prayer, a way of attending to the human which is a way of attending to the divine, charged as we are and the world is with the presence of God.

Domestic chores also become simply something to do. One cannot pray and meditate unendingly. There is a rhythm to life lived anywhere that calms the heart if we surrender to the necessities of the world around us and the world within."

It's just an excellent article and I'm honored to add it to this eclectic collection of contemplative writing. This is a really good find. Thanks, Brian!

"At Thomas Merton's Hermitage", by Murray Bodo, OFM

Mu

2010-06-24T12:01:00.000-05:00

To realize zen one has to pass through the barrier of the patriarch. Enlightenment always comes after the road of thinking is blocked. If you do not pass the barrier of the patriarchs or if your thinking road is not blocked, whatever you think, whatever you do, is like a tangling ghost. You may ask: What is a barrier of a patriarch? This one word, Mu, is it.

This is the barrier of zen. If you pass through it, you will see Joshu [Chinese zen master] face to face. Then you can work hand in hand with the whole line of patriarchs. Is this not a pleasant thing to do?

If you want to pass this barrier, you must work through every bone in your body, through every pore of your skin, filled with this question: What is Mu? and carry it day and night. Do not believe it is the common negative symbol meaning nothing. It is not nothingness, the opposite of existence. If you really want to pass this barrier, you should feel like drinking a hot iron ball that you can neither swallow nor spit out.

Then your previous lesser knowledge disappears. As a fruit ripening in season, your subjectivity and objectivity naturally become one. It is like a dumb man who has had a dream. He knows about it but he cannot tell it.

When he enters this condition his ego-shell is crushed and he can shake the heaven and move the earth. He is like a great warrior with a sharp sword. If a Buddha stands in his way, he will cut him down; if a patriarch offers him any obstacle, he will kill him; and he will be free in his way of birth and death. He can enter any world as if it were his own playground. I will tell you how to do this with this koan:

Just concentrate your whole energy into this Mu, and do not allow any discontinuation. When you enter this Mu and there is no discontinuation, your attainment will be as a candle burning and illuminating the whole universe.

Has a dog Buddha-nature?
This is the most serious question of all.
If you say yes or no,
You lose your own Buddha-nature.

- from "zen Flesh, zen Bones - a Collection of zen and pre-zen writings", 1957, compiled by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki

Poem for Thomas Merton by Dan Berrigan, Part 1

2010-06-21T15:45:00.000-05:00

1. 1969 Opened Like This

I wish I had some joy --
the text of eyes that pay
this year, all the last exacted; tears.
When Merton died, we met, struck dumb,
the old year's locking jaw
let blood, one last time; death, then this death

We blow up big the photo Griffin made --
Kentucky woods, hunched arms
overalls, Picasso moon face, Eyes

like a wrapt stranger among mourners
on a road, of a noon, in a landscape
stinking like graves. Hands outstretched
     filled with this world's
          (no other's)
               flowers, wounds;
               I have some joy!

more rock

2010-06-19T13:29:00.000-05:00

Photograph by Thomas Merton

wood

2010-06-19T13:27:00.000-05:00

Photograph by Thomas Merton

kentucky rock

2010-06-17T13:43:00.001-05:00

Photograph by Thomas Merton

This is definitely Kentucky rock, the kind that plentiful in Nelson County.

(What are your thoughts on this one, Dr. Burpenstein? something about those striations that start looking like Merton's abstract drawings to me ...)

Dan Berrigan, arrested again

2010-06-16T12:17:00.000-05:00

Dan Berrigan was arrested on Good Friday (2010) for standing with about a dozen others and attempting to dissuade tourists from going on board the Intrepid, an aircraft carried moored in the Hudson River. On June 1st a judge dismissed charges. You can read more about the incident on The America Magazine blogsite.

[I had to add the photo to louie-louie, being that I just posted the one from 1970.]

downtime

2010-06-14T15:39:00.000-05:00

Photograph by Thomas Merton

"An artist must have downtime, time to do nothing. Defending our right to such time takes courage, conviction and resiliency. Such time, space, and quiet will strike our family as a withdrawal from them. It is ... An artist requires the upkeep of creative solitude. An artist requires the time of healing alone. Without this period of recharging, our artist becomes depleted. ... We strive to be good, to be nice, to be helpful, to be unselfish. We want to be generous, of service, of the world. But what we really want is to be left alone. When we can’t get others to leave us alone, we eventually abandon ourselves. To others, we may look like we’re there. We may act like we’re there. But our true self has gone to ground. ... Over time, it becomes something worse than out of sorts. Death threats are issued." - Julia Cameron, from The Artist's Way

"Finally got back to my routine of Saturday fasting. Went out in the sun to Linton's farm and got a good burn on my shoulders, reading a little about Islam mystics and feeling once again something like myself. The visits have been a drag, no matter how much I like Lax, Jonathan Greene, Ron Seitz, Dick Sisto, etc. I just need to have long periods of no talking and no special thinking and immediate contact with the sun, the grass, the dirt, the leaves. Undistracted by statements, jokes, opinions, news. And undistracted by my own writing." - Merton, June 15, 1968, The Other Side of the Mountain, p. 130

clouds not clocks

2010-06-14T06:15:00.000-05:00

Almeria 2008 from Vicente + Sara on Vimeo.

I saw this on Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Daily Dish, this morning. It is lovely, contemplative. According to Karl Popper, a philosopher of science, the world was once divided into clouds and clocks:

Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, “highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.” The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by the false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencers. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds.

that wordless gentleness ...

2010-06-13T19:42:00.000-05:00

Photo by Thomas Merton

"Thomas Merton aimed for the image that was true to its subject and that had the mysterious ability to communicate fresh insights into it. His photographs began to reveal, in a way that nothing else did, certain aspects of his interior vision and his qualities as a man. His photographs were chosen not according to traditional canons of aesthetic beauty. He cared nothing for "the decisive moment" or "the characteristic moment". He selected only the frames that expressed his contemplative vision. In the "tremendous action" of contemplation, Merton held that it was not so much what you did that counted, but what you allowed to be done to yourself. He worked for photographic images which, when viewed without haste or pressure, might accomplish the slow work of communicating "a hidden wholeness", and perhaps reveal some hint of that wordless gentleness that flows out from "the unseen roots of all created being." - John Howard Griffin, The Hidden Wholeness, p. 4

On Prayer II

2010-06-07T17:24:00.002-05:00

[Note: This poem appeared in the June/July 2004 edition of "The Other Side", a magazine which is no longer published. ]

On Prayer II

Some prayers are like spears. They carry the whole weight
of the body behind them but they do not travel far.

Some prayers are like arrows flying light
and far and fast but they are never seen again.

Some prayers are like snares scattered in the woods,
ingenious and cunning -- but who knows what they will catch?

No. You cannot bring down the Holy One with prayer. He
is not caught in your traps. Listen -- you are yourself the hunted.

Your prayer is the sudden stillness on the path,
the in-drawn breath, the pounding heart as you scent the wind.

Have you learned this? Do you know?
You do not seek so much as you are sought.

You cannot pursue the Holy One -- or if you do,
it is only as the fish in the net pursues the fisherman.

- Robert Hudson
[Update: here is some more information about Robert Hudson.]

Dan Berrigan, arrested

2010-06-06T09:53:00.002-05:00

I came across this photo of Dan Berrigan via a louie reader. His comment: Who is really more free - D.B. or the sour faced g-men?

This photo definitely needs to be part of the louie collection! My guess is that this is the photo taken (August 12, 1970) when Berrigan was arrested after being "underground", hiding from the F.B.I for his part in the Cantonsville Nine action. For several months Berrigan was in the home of Robert Coles in Cambridge. He was finally caught on Block Island:

"Two F.B.I. agents attempting to disguise themselves as birders finally caught up with Berrigan, however, when he was staying in the home on Block Island, R.I., of the social activist and lay theologian William Stringfellow. “One day, Bill looked out the window and saw two men with binoculars acting as if they were bird watchers,” said Berrigan, “but since the weather was stormy, that seemed strange. ‘I think something’s up,’ Bill said, and sure enough they knocked on the door.” They took Berrigan back to Providence by ferry; the media, already alerted, were waiting at the pier. Berrigan showed me a poster in his apartment made from a photo taken at that moment. Smiling broadly, he was in handcuffs between two burly F.B.I. agents as they escorted him off the ferry. A reminder of Block Island lies on his living room floor: a dozen curiously shaped stones from the beach there. " - from an article in America Magazine by George Anderson, "Looking Back in Gratitude - a conversation with Daniel Berrigan", July 6, 2009

(louie-louie is going to kick back into gear soon, I promise. I've been mulling over the relationship between art and contemplative-ness, lately, and can't quite come to a blog-way of putting it down.)

compassion as a meeting point

2010-05-25T07:31:00.002-05:00

The Dalai Lama is one of the true spiritual teachers of our time. This article, in today's NY Times, mentions the significance of his meeting with Merton in India in 1968.

Many Faiths, One Truth

More discussion of Merton's meetings with the Dalai Lama is here.

the news

2010-05-18T07:48:00.002-05:00

"Nine-tenths of the news, as printed in the papers, is pseudo-news, manufactured events. Some days ten-tenths. The ritual morning trance, in which one scans columns of newsprint, creates a peculiar form of generalized pseudo-attention to a pseudo-reality. This experience is taken seriously. It is one's daily immersion in "reality." One's orientation to the rest of the world. One's way of reassuring himself that he has not fallen behind. That he is still there. That he still counts!

"My own experience has been that renunciation of this self-hypnosis, of this participation in the unquiet universal trance, is no sacrifice of reality at all. To "fall behind" in this sense is to get out of the big cloud of dust that everybody is kicking up, to breathe and to see a little more clearly."

- Thomas Merton, p151, Faith and Violence. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968

you do not need to leave your room ...

2010-05-06T18:17:00.000-05:00

"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet." - Franz Kafka

Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967) - "Art is art. Everything else is everything else."

2010-04-26T07:58:00.012-05:00

Photo by Robert Lax

"Art is art. Everything else is everything else." - Ad Reinhardt

In other words, art does not represent something else. Art stands on its own, a living entity, in and of itself.

Reinhardt was a pioneer of conceptual and minimal art. He was a critic of abstract expressionism. Reinhardt’s earliest exhibited paintings avoided representation, and show a steady progression away from objects and external reference. He is best known for his Black paintings of the 1960s.

Ad Reinhardt, Merton and Lax were friends. They met while they were students at Columbia University in New York City. (Actually, Reinhart and Lax attended the same high school, but that's another story) Ad was studying art history at Columbia and frequently contributed cartoons to the school newspaper, Jester, where Merton and Lax were staffers.

The three were bonded by a common vision. A similar calling that centered around simplicity and emptiness. Though they each went their own way in the world, they never lost sight of each other.

"... I think Ad Reinhardt is possibly the best artist in America ... Reinhardt's abstract art is pure and religious. It flies away from all naturalism, from all representation ... " - Merton, 1940, "Run to the Mountain, page 128

Merton, Lax, and Reinhardt form a potent troika, forging into new territory. Continuing the "Beat" style of their youth, they are unusual, contrary to what is considered traditional or accepted, off the beaten track, outside the norm. Reinhardt's paintings remain controversial decades after they were composed. Lax's poetry is shocking in its simplicity and is still relatively unknown in America. Merton's writings are popular, but he was rejected for inclusion in the Catholic Catechism.

In the spring of 1959 Lax and Reinhardt visited Merton at Gethsemane. In his thank you note, Reinhardt says to Merton:

"... let's argue about art and religion some more. If you're doing a book on it, and you have a world-wide audience, can I help you say what's right, instead of saying things people want to hear and agree with? You just make people happy if you don't say what's right, true (beautiful?) ... thanks for the weekend."

In fact, in 1962 Merton was taken with the art of William Congdon, an American painter, abstract expressionist and devout Catholic who focused on religious themes. Merton wrote a few paragraphs praising Congdon's work, and threw in a line condemning abstraction:

"... here the dynamism of abstraction has been set free from its compulsive, Donysian and potentially orgiastic self-frustraion and raised to the level of spirituality." - Thomas Merton, jacket copy for William Congdon, In My Disc of Gold: Itinerary to Christ of William Congdon, 1962

Well, Reinhardt soon caught wind of this and fired off to Merton a blistering letter, taking him to task for his poor judgement.

" ... I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw ... Why shouldn't you be human after all ... have you given up on hope? Have you no respect for sacredness and art? ... Are you throwing in the trowel at long last? Can't you tell your impasto from a holy ground? ... We'll send help, hold on, old man." - Ad Reinhardt letter to Merton, 1962

Merton had the good sense to listen to Reinhardt's criticism. His reply, though superficially humerous, shows that Merton and Reinhardt were looking at each other, eye to eye, and this was a time of reckoning.

"Dear Ad,
"Once, twice, often, repeatedly, I have reached out for your letter and for the typewriter. Choked with sobs, or rather more often carried away by the futilities of life, I have desisted ...

"Truly immersed in the five skandhas and plunged in avidya, I have taken the shell for the nut and the nut for the nugget and the nugget for the essence and the essence for the such-ness ... I have embraced a bucket of schmaltz. I have accepted the mish mash of kitsch. I have been made public with a mitre of marshmallows upon my dumkopf. This is the price of folly and the wages of middle-aged perversity. I thought my friends would never know ... I am up to my neck. I am in the wash. I am under the mangle. I am publicly identified with all the idols. I am the byword of critics and galleries. I am eaten alive by the art racket. I am threatened with publication of a great book of horrors which I have despised and do recant." - Merton letter to Ad Reinhardt, 1962

Merton decisively moved to Reinhardt's camp and the world of contemporary art. As an artist, he would not go back to his drawings of Our Lady. As an author, he would not turn medieval concepts to a task for which they were not suited.

Like Lax and Reinhardt, Merton headed into the Unknown.

Ad Reinhardt died on August 30, 1967, of heart problems. He was 53 years old.

[photo by Merton, cover of Monk's Pond 1st edition, spring 1968]

As a memorial to Reinhardt, Merton published in the first issue of his literary magazine, Monk's Pond, a chantlike text by Reinhardt, dating to 1962. Here is one verse of that text:

"The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive - non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective. the only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not." - Ad Reinhardt, Monk's Pond 1, Spring 1968, p. 6 first published in Art International, December 1962

Sounds like God, doesn't it?

See also - does art have anything to do with life? (Robert Lax on Ad Reinhardt)

song for our lady of cobre

2010-04-25T13:24:00.003-05:00

In April of 1940 (70 years ago), Merton took a vacation/pilgrimage to Cuba. At the time he was teaching English at St. Bonaventure's College in Olean and had applied to join the Franciscans (and was soon to be rejected). Merton was enchanted with the Cuban people, their friendliness, their dance and song.

He visited several monasteries and churches:

"... as for the churches around Cuba, I must say that I have never seen such churches or such things when I was in a church. There is a church here called La Soledad which has in it a miraculous image, and when I walked into the place I was picked up by my feet off the floor and seen not a ring of pure and endless light but rather a great ring of nothing which was absolutely real, indescribable and also a little frightening. It was clearer than if I had seen it which my eyes, but it was simply nothing, and there was no sensible note included in it anywhere, and anyway I was on the edge of it like on the edge of an abyss ... " - from a letter to Lax dated April 1940

Iglesia de Nuestra Senora de la Soledad in Camabuey

Merton also visited the church of Our Lady of Charity of Cobre (La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre), patroness of Cuba. A woman of mixed race, she also represents, Ochun, the African goddess of love, femininity and the river. She is the symbol of feminine sensuality.

This is probably the finest of Merton's early poems. Merton later made some changes to it, but I like it in its original form. He seems to be influenced by the beat of calypso music.

Song for Our Lady of Cobre

The white girls stir their heads like trees,
The black girls go
Reflected like flamingoes in the street.

The white girls sing as shrill as water,
The black girls speak
As loud as clay.
[The published version reads: The black girls talk/As quiet as day."]

The white girls open their arms like clouds,
The black girls close their eyes like wings;
Angels bow down like bells,
Angels look up like toys,

Because the heavenly stars
Stand in a ring,
And all the pieces of the mosaic, earth,
Get up and fly away like birds.

-Thomas Merton

[drawings by Thomas Merton]

My Eye Your Eye

2010-04-23T08:32:00.010-05:00

Merton said that Lax had a direct link to the living God.

On the DVD, middle of the moment, there is a bonus film, My Eye Your Eye. Filmed in Patmos in May 1999, this is Robert Lax’s last year in Greece, roughly his last year of life. For 21 minutes you see only Lax’s head and his right hand, which holds a wooden staff of sorts (a walking stick or ... a broomstick?!). He wears a navy blue knit hat. The only movement is in his eyes, and ever so slight movements of his head. Lax does not look at the camera, his eyes are mostly downcast, but he is awake and aware, watching and waiting, and you are drawn into his profound stillness.

All of those who were able to meet Lax during his lifetime consider it a particular stroke of fortune. They say that from that point on he became part of their bodies and souls, as though they had met a true saint.

My Eye Your Eye is like being in the presence of holiness. For 20 minutes. Watching and waiting. I've always wanted to know better what Bob Lax was like - how he was. This film does it.

There is a poem of the same name by Lax:

My eye. Your eye. Or even if it’s mine and mine.
Why should my eye look at your eye?
Why should yours look into mine?
Am I seeking out a glance, a look in darkness?

Robert Lax

middle of the moment

2010-04-22T08:01:00.000-05:00

If you appreciated the film, "Into Great Silence", you will like "middle of the moment", a cinepoem about nomadic life by Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel. The film not only chronicles people as they move from place to place, it becomes a nomadic experience itself - not afraid to stay in one place, but knowing when it's time to move on.

"The essence of any experience, any moment, is to be found where people are in most intense contact with the place they occupy. And, paradoxically, it is through a nomadic existence that one occupies a space the most intensely. Whether the nature of this nomadism is largely physical, as for the wandering tribes that travel the South Sahara and Cirque O or rather abstract, as for American philosopher and poet Robert Lax, is not so important. What the people portrayed in this documentary share is that their nomadic disposition, which strips life down to its bare essentials, makes them into completely centred human beings. They are not stuck in life’s cycles but co-exist with them, partaking in them with a freedom that is unknown to most of us."

--Miram Van Leer

more Lax quotes

2010-04-10T11:28:00.000-05:00

photo by Nicolas Humbert

"...in mountains where sheep are
indistinguishable from snow
the snow from the cloud, the
clouds from the sky..."

and one more,

"no hope of comprehending the whole, no hope
of understanding any one object either, without
some comprehension of the whole.

no hope of solution of these problems;
no possibility of abandoning them either (as
long as one lives)

better to be engaged in them to be engaged by
them, in spirit of play (serious spirit, serious
play) while time passes over one, under one, through
one."

Robert Lax, from something called the "C Journal"

"always divided and pulled in many directions"

2010-03-22T10:16:00.000-05:00

“When we live superficially ... we are always outside ourselves, never quite ‘with’ ourselves, always divided and pulled in many directions ... we find ourselves doing many things that we do not really want to do, saying things we do not really mean, needing things we do not really need, exhausting ourselves for what we secretly realize to be worthless and without meaning in our lives.”

-- Thomas Merton
Love and Living

let the great world spin

2010-03-20T12:25:00.001-05:00

Occasionally on this blog I have recommended a book because of its relation to Merton’s writings, or because of its unique contemplative perspective. I’ve got another one: “Let The Great World Spin” by Colum McCann. It has nothing to do with Merton other than sharing a city.

At first glance, it might seem to have little to do with contemplativeness either. Sirens are mentioned often. On one hand it is a simple narrative of lives entwined in the early 1970’s. Most of it takes place on one day in New York in August 1974 when Phillipe Petit (unnamed in the book) makes his tightrope walk across the World Trade Center towers, a walk that was called “the artistic crime of the 20th century.”

Here is a description from Random House:

In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.

... a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s.

... A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a “fiercely original talent” (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal.

I don't want to say too much and spoil the discovery. I feel more in love and more alive for having read this book.

sheep & wolves

2010-03-15T10:05:00.001-05:00

"In the refectory a tendentious book about Communism is being read. Communism is insidious. We should hate all that is insidious, especially this ultimate diabolical insidiousness which is Communism. If we truly hate it with all the power of our being, then we can be sure that we ourselves are, and will remain righteous, free, sincere, honest, open. Today, then (we are told) hatred of Communism is the test of a good Christian. The pledge of all truth is political hate. Hate Castro. Khrushchev. Hate Mao. All this in the same breath as "God's merciful love" and "the beatings of the Sacred Heart." There seems to be some other dimension we have not discovered....

[St. John] Chrysostom has some fine things to say about sheep and wolves in the III Nocturn of St. Barnabas' Day. "As long as we remain sheep, we overcome. Even though we may be surrounded by a thousand wolves, we overcome and are victorious. But as soon as we are wolves, we are beaten: for then we lose the support of the Shepherd, who feeds not wolves, but only sheep." (from Homily 34 on St. Matthew)"

-- Thomas Merton
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
p 33 of the Doubleday hardcover edition, p 44-45 of the Image
paperback edition

HP to Jim Forest

silence

2010-03-07T10:13:00.000-05:00

"In silence we face and admit the gap between the depth of our being, which we consistently ignore, and the surface which is untrue to our own reality. We recognize the need to be at home with ourselves in order that we may go out to meet others, not just with a mask of affability, but with real commitment and authentic love.

That is the reason for choosing silence."

Merton, Thomas. Love & Living. Naomi Burton Stone and Br. Patrick Hart, Editors. New York: Harcourt. 1979, p. 41.

From the daily Lenten series of quotes being sent out by Vanessa Hurst at The Merton Institute. Her selection of Merton writings is excellent. You can subscribe to the daily emails at www.mertoninstitute.org.

snowy road

2010-02-10T15:28:00.001-05:00

Photo by Thomas Merton

(A reader requested a "snow" photograph from Merton. Being in Florida now, I can't really relate ...

Another photo of the hermitage in heavy snow is here.)

"prayer is something that happens to you ..."

2010-02-10T12:21:00.000-05:00

"Prayer is something that happens to you (Romans 8:26-27), much more than anything you privately do. It is an allowing of the Big Self more than an assertion of the small self. Eventually you will find yourself preferring to say, “Prayer happened, and I was there” more than “I prayed today.” All you know is that you are being led, being guided, being loved, being used, being prayed through—and you are no longer in the driver’s seat.

"God stops being an object of attention like any other object in the world, and becomes at some level your own “I am.” You start knowing through, with, and in Somebody Else. Your little “I Am” becomes “We Are.” Please trust me on this. It might be the most important thing I could tell you."

Fr. Richard Rohr, from The Naked Now, pp. 102-103

HT to barefoot toward the Light

Lax - the peacemaker's handbook

2010-02-09T19:04:00.002-05:00

Lax’s poetry is vertical, going down the page instead of across. In order to get the cadence, you have to read and see the vertical lines as they go up and down and across the page as well, like stanzas. It does a number on your mind, reading this way. You can't assume that you know what is coming next.

The St. Bonaventure Archive site has pdf files of one of Lax’s works - The Peacemaker’s Handbook. Peacemaker’s Handbook was first published by Pendo Verlag of Zurich Switzerland in 2001. Most of Lax's poetry was published by European book companies in English with facing German translated pages. I could find many of them on Amazon.de, but not the U.S. site.

The reproduced text on the pdf's linked to below is a digital copy of the original typescript/printout submitted for that publication. It differs from the published version in regards to the arrangement of some portions of the text. But it gives you a good idea of how Lax’s poetry should look on a page. (I would love to see this book reproduced in America.)

The Peacemaker’s Handbook - part 1

The Peacemaker's Handbook - part 2

The Peacemaker's Handbook - part 3: Contemplation

The Peacemaker's Handbook - part 4: Peacemaking

Here is a little snippet from the Peacemaking part:

fight

fire

with

what
?

water

---

(seriously, though, you need to read the whole thing to get the breadth and depth of Lax's simple wisdom)

And here is a little snippet from the Contemplation part:

con
tem
pla
tion

is

watch
ing

---

what

hap
pens

if

you

watch

?

you

be
gin

to

see

---

trees

2010-02-07T12:53:00.003-05:00

Photo by Thomas Merton

prophet and poet of slowness

2010-02-06T17:11:00.007-05:00

Photo by Nicolas Humbert

It is said that those who knew Bob Lax consider it a particular stroke of good fortune. From that point on, he became a part of their own life, in body and soul. Even though I never met him, the more I come to know Lax, the more it seems like he is part of me too. Or it's easier to find my own "Lax-ness" within.

Lax lived the last years of his life on a Greek island, writing. Writing and living were not separate things for Lax. His last notebooks - november 2, 1999 until march 2, 2000 - are collected in a work that is known as “acrobat off”. It contains poems - or "momentos", as Lax called them - with names like: now is now, advice, end of the line, reporter in the land of dreams, train of thought.

Lax died in september 2000 in his childhood home in Olean NY.

I know that I can never do justice to Lax’s writings. Even copying them here will not work, because there is an inherent rhythm and surrounding stand-stillness in the way that the word parts are laid out on the page that can’t be “blogged”. Still, there are fragments that I am again drawn to. Like this:

you

were

cre
a
ted

to

be

a

part

of

the

un
i
verse

(the

whole)

let

go

fall

in
to
place

&

you

will

dis
cov
er

what
ev
er

that

place

may

be

---

let

go

?

fall

in
to

place

?
that’s

the

clear
est

way

I

can

say

at

the

mo
ment

what

I

mean

what

I’m

try
ing

to

say

---

let

go

of

what

?

what
ev
er

i
dea

you

have

of

who

or

what

you

may

be

hold

on
to

noth
ing

just

fall

---

can

you

say

that

some

bet
ter

way

?

if

ev
er

I

fall

into

one
I

will

(time:
2:47
A.M.
Nov.
10)

---

fall

?

like

fall
ing

a
sleep

---

fall

in

love

---

fall

in
to

Tao

---

in
to

grace

---

(6:30
A.M.
Nov. 10)

rise

ear
ly

&

let

things

fall

into

place

---

Robert Lax, "you were created to be a part", p. 92 from the catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition, Three Islands: Richard Stankiewicz, June Leaf, Robert Lax, held at the Museum Tinguely, Basel, between September 2004 and January 2005.

the success (or not) of Lax

2010-01-31T13:12:00.012-05:00

Photo by Nicolas Humbert

During the mid 1940s, while Merton was settling into the monk’s life and writing his autobiography, Seven Story Mountain, Bob Lax was trying to figure out how to be a writer. He had short and unsatisfying stints in New York writing for Time, Life, Parade, and the New Yorker. He went to Hollywood where he spent two years in the script department at Sam Goldwyn studios. He wrote to Merton that Hollywood made him feel unholy, how could the good life be this idle?!

Lax followed his own inner callings, bumbling around in poverty for years, and ending up as a quasi-hermit on a Greek island. There were certain things central to his soul that he would not compromise. For one thing, he did not want to do anything that required "effort", and he refused to fly on an airplane. (I don't think the airplane phobia had to do with fear as much as to the confusion flying did to his sense of space and place.)

Whether or not Bob Lax was a "success" is anybody's guess, and probably depends on what you mean by success. He never did anything to court publicity or expand his literary career or reputation, but he sure became a writer to be reckoned with.

The following, rather glum entry, is from his journal dated January 5, 1945:

your whole trouble, Charlie, and we may as well talk about your whole trouble as anybody elses, because you won’t be able to fix anybody elses until you are able to fix your own which you know better than anybody elses, your whole trouble is not being able to stick to anything long enough to get good at it. …

writing, I figure, is what you ought to stick to, it’s the one thing you’ve got a pretty good start on and sometimes have done o.k. with. drawring is maybe ok to kid with.

one thing about writing is ideas of silence. …

second is a feeling that if you aren’t writing a letter or a book on charity you aren’t doing what you ought to do.

third is a feeling that because M V D [Mark Van Doren] and Slate said once are you still writing the journal you ought to be still writing the journal. …

fourth is the idea that unless you are writing noel cowed plays, movies, new Yorker articles, note comment or cole porter songs, you are wasting your time.

fifth is the idea that unless you are travelling from county to county with a guitar singing spirituals and preachin the gospel you are wasting your time.

sixth is the idea that you are never wasting your time, but yes you are.

seventh is the idea that unless you are doing whatever somebody asks you to, you are doing something silly on your own hook.

eighth is the idea that unless you are eating or sleeping you are wasting your time, unless you are exercising.

ninth is the idea that when you are eating or sleeping you are wasting your time, unless you are getting an idea for a novel (you don’t know what it is because you’ve never read one).

tenth is the idea that anybody who isn’t either dead and in heaven or horizontal and on a psychoanalyst’s day bed is wasting his time.

eleven is the idea that waking or sleeping, alive or dead you are just the nicest little fellow you ever met.

[Incidentally, today is Merton’s birthday. louie blog entry regarding Merton’s birthday: a certainty of tread, happy birthday father louie!]

success

2010-01-25T20:30:00.000-05:00

"The danger of education, I have found, is that it so easily confuses means with ends. Worse than that, it quite easily forgets both and devotes itself merely to mass production of uneducated graduates -- people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade which they and their contemporaries have conspired to call “life.”

"A few years ago a man who was compiling a book entitled “Success” wrote and asked me to contribute a statement on how I got to be a success. I replied indignantly that I was not able to consider myself a success in any terms that had meaning to me. I swore I had spent my life strenuously avoiding success. If it so happened that I had once written a best seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naivete, and I would take very good care not to do the same again. If I had a message to my contemporaries, I said, it was simply this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success."

-- Thomas Merton
Love & Living
edited by Naomi Burton Stoine and Brother Patrick Hart
Farrer Straus Giroux. 1979 page 11 (in the chapter “Learning to Live”)

[I think I may have this quote somewhere else on louie, but it bears repeating.]

Haiti

2010-01-22T09:21:00.001-05:00

Please remember Gerry Straub as he returns to Haiti this week. Gerry is a filmmaker, serving the poor. His blog is here.

Below is a video that Gerry made in December (before the earthquake). Most of the filming is of the large Port-au-Prince slum, Cite Soleil (City of the Sun). I was in Cite Soliel in 1992, a very dense, dark, and dangerous place. I remember the energy and noise that seemed to encircle us, as we made our way down a few of the streets and alleyways. For us, it was a tourist attraction of sorts - something we have never before seen or been a part of. We held on to each other. Being this close to this kind of poverty is powerful. It reaches deep into your soul. You can't turn away your eyes - you have to look.

freedom

2010-01-22T09:07:00.002-05:00

“Our lives are the mysterious intersection of freedom. God’s freedom and our freedom.” - Fr. Dan Berrigan

buds

2010-01-20T11:11:00.000-05:00

Photograph by Thomas Merton

notes on Merton photography

2010-01-20T10:12:00.004-05:00

"Thomas Merton's approach to photography, and one of the reasons his photography is truly personal, lay in his use of his lenses primarily as contemplative instruments. He photographed the things he contemplated. His "serious work," as he called it, is meditation. He did not seek to capture or possess, and certainly not to arrange the objects he photographed. He lent his vision and his lenses to them in a real way: he was there and he did the mechanical things - focusing, composing - but he allowed the objects to remain true to themselves and to reveal themselves, and he trusted that "the connections would somehow be made."

"Merton distinguished between his serious work and the documentary uses he made of photography. In the latter, he captured faces and places and events as any good photographer would, though with his own personal characteristics of wit and composition. In the serious work he was captured by the play of light, the ambiance, and the inner life of the things he photographed.

"Finally, for him, the best images were the silent but communicative. In his writing he used words, with their implied sounds, to explore and express silence. He struggled toward an expression of silence through the visual image, in photographs that communicated the essence of silence without any implied sounds. In this he worked as a painter might, approaching his goal through many photographic sketches and studies."

- John Howard Griffin, from "The Hidden Wholeness" pp 4-5

Merton started out with an Instamatic camera - the photo over on the right - the only known photo of God - was made with that camera (according to Jim Forest). As he became more interested in photography he borrowed better cameras, mostly from his photography mentor and friend, John Howard Griffin. Griffin told him that he would never get much satisfaction from his work until he got a good camera. Merton responded that he had taken a vow of poverty and did not want to ask permission to buy a camera. Hence, the arrangement whereby Griffin loaned him "in perpetuity" some good cameras.

In the book, "The Hidden Wholeness", John Howard Griffin mentions a Roleiflex and I believe it was a Leica that Merton took to Asia with him. A closer look at the photo on the right above - looking at Merton looking - the letters on the camera read: ALPA. I'd guess that those were about the best cameras that could be had at the time.

Merton published few of his photographs, but during the last 3 years of his life he was photographing steadily and built up a large archive. He sent his undeveloped film to John Howard Griffin, who developed and stored it in his darkroom archive.

window, vines and snow

2010-01-16T07:40:00.003-05:00

Photo by Thomas Merton

roots, snow and branches

2010-01-14T20:55:00.004-05:00

Photograph by Thomas Merton

... spontaneous, freewheeling ...

2010-01-14T20:12:00.003-05:00

These Merton thoughts come from The Merton Institute for Contemplative Living. They send an email every Monday with a quote from Merton. I don't want to lose this one.

Life consists in learning to live on one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling: to do this one must recognize what is one's own - be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid.

Thomas Merton. Love and Living. (New York: Harcourt, 1965). P 3

Tree on a hill

2010-01-08T20:43:00.002-05:00

Photograph by Thomas Merton

more Dorothy

2010-01-08T09:00:00.003-05:00

I can't say enough about these videos of Dorothy Day. Here are 3 more 10-minute videos, this time an interview with Hubert Jessup. Dorothy tells about the beginning of the Catholic Worker Movement, her Catholic faith, Peter Maurin, etc.

part 1:
http://www.youtube.com/user/4854derrida#p/u/5/tRSjY_4fFfc

part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/user/4854derrida#p/u/4/kR_6miCs7FA

part 3:
http://www.youtube.com/user/4854derrida#p/u/3/cp8TLypf4hY