Jesus and Buddha as Brothers

 Map of Matter in the Universe

Full sky map from ESA Plank mission showing matter between the earth and the edge of the observable universe.

The bread that Jesus handed to you, to us, is real bread, and if you can eat real bread you have real life. But we are not able to eat real bread. We only try to eat the word bread or the notion of bread. Even when we are celebrating the Eucharist, we are still eating notions and ideas. “Take, my friends, this is my flesh, this is my blood.” Can there be any more drastic language in order to wake you up? What could Jesus have said that is better than that? You have been eating ideas and notions, and I want you to eat real bread so that you become alive. If you come back to the present moment, fully alive, you will realize this is real bread, this piece of bread is the body of the whole cosmos.

If Christ is the body of God, which he is, then the bread he offers is also the body of the cosmos. Look deeply and you notice the sunshine in the bread, the blue sky in the bread, the cloud and the great earth in the bread. Can you tell me what is not in a piece of bread? The whole cosmos has come together in order to bring to you this piece of bread. You eat it in such a way that you become alive, truly alive. . . . Eat in such a way that the Holy Spirit becomes an energy within you and then the piece of bread that Jesus gives to you will stop being an idea, a notion. 

- Thich Nhat Hanh, Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999), 106–107

HT: Richard Rohr OFM

Ancient Sources of Monastic Vision and Experience

Painting by Brother Tobias Haller

Sometimes I find good things on Facebook. This is from Anabela Rozwadowska.

》THOMAS MERTON had a very strong attraction to Zen. 

In his lecture, 'Monastic Experience and East-West Dialogue,' delivered in Calcutta shortly before he died, Merton said:

"I come as a pilgrim who is anxious to obtain not just information, not just 'facts' about other monastic traditions but to drink from ancient sources of monastic vision and experience. 

I seek not to just learn more quantitatively about religion and monastic life but to become a better and more enlightened monk myself."

In Merton's book 'Zen and the Birds of Appetite' he states:

"Both Christianity and Buddhism show that suffering remains inexplicable, most of all for the man who attempts to explain it in order to evade it, or who thinks explanation itself is an escape.

Suffering is not a 'problem' as if it were something we could stand outside and control. Suffering, as both Christianity and Buddhism see, each in its own way, is part of our very ego-identity and empirical existence, and the only thing to do about it is to plunge right into the middle of contradiction and confusion in order to be transformed by what Zen calls 'the great death' and Christianity calls 'dying and rising with Christ."

In his talk in Calcutta he affirmed:

 "I think that now we have reached a stage of religious maturity at which it may be possible for someone to remain perfectly faithful to a Christian and Western monastic commitment and yet learn, in depth from a Hindu or Buddhist discipline or experience. Some of us need to do this in order to improve the quality of our own monastic life."

Shortly before Merton died, he told Brother David Steindl-Rast:

 "I do not believe that I could understand our Christian faith the way I understand it if it were not for the light of Buddhism."

.----

I wholeheartedly agree. It is the same for me. 

 

Jesus Lama

 

Thomas Merton and the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, 1968.
Courtesy of John Howard Griffin.

In the last couple of days I've come across some things that have given me a slightly different feel for Merton. A little more insight into who Merton was, how he was, as a person living in the world. When I dream of Merton, he always has aspects of a very friendly and somewhat rambunctious dog. And though Merton is not easy to pin down, I think I'm on the right track ...

The first article is in Tricycle, a Buddhist magazine. "The Jesus Lama: Thomas Merton in the Himalayas".  It is an interview with Harold Thomas. Thomas, at the time, was a skinny 27 year old, a Catholic convert, and in India studying Buddhism with the Dalai Lama. 

Talbot had met Merton at Gethsemane in 1958, 10 years before and just after his conversion, when Merton told him: "And I have only one thing to say to you: the Church is a very big place. Always remember to go your own way in it.”  Talbot remembered that and recounted it to Merton upon meeting him again in Asia. To which Merton replied: “Did I say that? That’s pretty good. And look at where we both are.” 

Dom Aelred Graham, the Dalai Lama, and Talbott, 1967.

It turns out that Harold Talbot was in Asia serving as a secretary to Dam Aelred Graham, author of Zen Catholicism. I have long been fascinated with the notion of Zen Catholicism. It is the way that I understand my own Catholicism. 

“What is really meant … is continual openness to God, attentiveness, listening, disposability, etc. In the terms of Zen, it is not awareness of but simple awareness.” (Day of a Stranger, p.41, written in 1965)

In some notes that Merton prepared for an exhibition of his calligraphic drawings, he writes:

“Neither rustic nor urbane, Eastern nor Western, perhaps can be called expressions of Zen Catholicism”. (from a notebook in the TMC collection)

 

Talbot is able, in this interview, to explain to me how Merton understood Zen within the context of his Christian tradition and how he "got" the consciousness of dzogchen -- what exactly happened to him at Pollonaruwa. If you're interested in this sort of thing, read the full interview. This is the very best interpretation of Merton's Pollonaruwa experience -- which I never quite understood -- that I have ever read. 

At first Merton had no interest in meeting with the Dalai Lama whom he presumed to be the big banana of an organized religion. Talbot persisted. This is how the meeting is recounted in the interview:

Talbott: The Dalai Lama’s robe and Thomas Merton’s white Cistercian habit with the black scapular looked Giottoesque. It was an image of two figures encountering each other who deserved to wear those robes, who were part and parcel of the world represented by those very robes. So that one really had a surfeit of visual inspiration. Both men were very solid. Unornamental, compact, strong, hard beings. Now the Dalai Lama has an external joviality and graciousness which is appropriate to a sovereign. To put you at your ease, to make it possible for beings to be in relation to him, he plays down the radiance, the dignity, the charisma, the persona that the West has developed a romantic myth about, but who in himself has his own distinct presence and radiance. There is no presumption about him. He’s a person who draws a heart-breaking reverence from the people who are devoted to him, and to see him in this room with a man to whom we don’t need to apply adjectives, but if we were, it would be things like mensch, authentic…

Tricycle: Merton?

Talbott: Yes. Mensch—manly, authentic. No gestures. No artifice. No manner. No program, no come-on—just, “Here I am folks”—and folks happened to be the Dalai Lama. And they encountered each other and, appropriately enough, there was utter silence. And then the Dalai Lama challenged him or greeted him by saying, “What do you want?” and he said, “I want to study dzogchen.” I was about to clobber Merton. I couldn’t take it. But I was very glad to be aboard. It was the generosity of Merton that made it possible for me to attend those meetings. He said, “You’re here studying with the Dalai Lama. I want you present.” Whereas it might have been delightful to be alone with just the Dalai Lama and the interpreter. It’s my good karma that I was there. There was so much good humor and so much laughter and so much camaraderie and so much confidence of understanding and so much no need for explanation and build-up and equipping themselves on their parts, you see. They had done their homework.

Tricycle: What did the Dalai Lama ask Merton about Christianity?

Talbott: If I’m not mistaken, it was about how you live the contemplative life in the West and what you do to make it possible in this modern world to live the life of a monk in the West. How do you stave off spiritual annihilation? These conversations were very much Merton equipping himself with the transmission of Buddhism from the Dalai Lama and very much the Dalai Lama equipping himself with the low-down from a reliable guide. This was not a papal legate. This was not someone setting up a conference for the Pope. This was not a front man. This was an embodiment of something which another embodiment—a tulku—who needs to function in the world, was drawing upon as a resource.

Tricycle: Did Merton have a daily meditation practice?

Talbott: I have no idea, but I asked him once, like a very fresh kid, “What is your meditation practice? And what do you think of this stuff?” He said, “My meditation practice is largely walking in the woods in a state of meditative absorption.” 

Tricycle: It sounds like the Dalai Lama was providing a transmission to be carried forth to all of Christendom. 

Talbott: The Dalai Lama is saying to him, “I want with my own eyes and ears and speech to assure myself that you have the faith firmly grounded” and—let’s be daring—let’s think that there are certain beings who do not have to come every day and attend Zen or vipassana retreat. This could be a romantic projection but I have to say what I think: Merton had thirty years behind him and when he walked into a room or the cell of a meditator, monk or lama, he was greeted with a recognition. I’ve never seen a Western person received by a lama the way that he was received. 

Tricycle: Did the Dalai Lama feel personally responsible that Merton get it right? 

Talbott: That’s how I see it. Dzogchen is the primordial state of mind, it’s the enlightened mind, that has never been anything but enlightened. We are living in a world, it is said, which is a product of our own unenlightened experience, our ma rigpa, our ignorance of the true nature of reality, absolute and relative.Dzogchen is the practice of the primordial enlightenment but it is also a view or standpoint towards reality. Its meditation is to sustain and deepen this. That’s a contradiction because dzogchen is the presence of fulfillment, not a process. We already are in primordial—or original—enlightenment in dzogchen. That’s the starting place. 

It's all just extraordinary.

Finally, 

He [Merton] had reached a point—unrecognizable to me and perhaps to you—where the Judeo-Christian theistic tradition of the Mother Church of Christendom and dzogchen of Nyingmapa Tibetan Buddhism were not in contradiction. Furthermore he had grown up in a Catholic village in France that had so deeply affected him that it had planted a seed which had caused him to enter the Church. He was a man who had spent thirty years in a Cistercian abbey. His training came from the Church. He was a generous man and he was a just man and he acknowledged what he owed to the Church. It was his formation. It was not his cocoon. It was not his prison. It was himself and it was a very good self and he needed to uphold it. 

...

Because Merton stood for the contemplative life the way—to make a vulgar and irrelevant analogy—Picasso stands for art. For contemplatives there are illuminated beings, there are hidden yogis, but as far as how ordinary people come into touch with the great spiritual heritage of the West—including the apophatic tradition, the Via Negativa—it’s through the mystical teachings from St. Paul and St. John, St. John’s gospel, Dionysius the Areopagite, the great medieval mystics Thomas Aquinas and St. John of the Cross, and St. Teresa of Avila—and that’s just about it, folks—that’s it for the big league contributions to spirituality at the contemplative level in the West. And every now and then you get somebody who says “Wait a minute, I know the chips are down and the circumstances are against us, but let’s get in there once more and try to stay alive spiritually.” And that’s Merton for twentieth-century Westerners. Despite all of his manliness, Merton was a man of the old moment before the Second World War, a man of enormous personal and cultural refinement. He belonged in a French salon as well as in a forest in Kentucky. There is no question about it. He had the qualities we’re losing. Gaining, gaining other wonderful ones but losing, losing something. Merton had this consummate worldly culture as well as this jewel of spirituality. He was a gift to humanity, with the naivete and the nerve to take the writings of mystics seriously. 

...

Merton saw himself as a man who had to purify himself of something that was a very heavy load to carry. But by the time he came to India, whether or not finding dzogchen was central—that’s my organization of significance in his life—it turns out that he had lived his life and this was the Mozart finale and he was in a state of utmost exuberance, engaged, and absorbing, and eating with delectation every moment of every experience and every person that passed. He tipped Sikh taxi drivers like a Proustian millionaire. He was on a roll, on a toot, on a holiday from school. He was a grand seigneur, a great lord of the spiritual life. He radiated a sense of “This is an adventure, here I am folks,” and he woke people up and illuminated them and enchanted them and gave them a tremendous happiness and a good laugh. But also there was always a communication from him that he was a representative of the religious life whether he was wearing a windbreaker or a habit. The Indian people greeted him as a pilgrim, a seeker, and that was the basis on which he was met by everybody and congratulated valiantly whether they recognized his public identity or not. People knew his spiritual quality. People in planes knew it. There was no question about it. Merton was not an object of scrutiny, he was an event.

Just extraordinary.

How glad I am that I discovered Merton's writings early in my life and that he has been my guide all the way through. This is a terrific interview, Harold Talbot. Thank you for your invaluable insights.

The Essence of all Spirituality is Presence

The essence of all spirituality is presence,
a state of consciousness that transcends thinking.
There is a space behind and in between your thoughts and emotions.
When you become aware of that space,
you are present,
and you realize that your personal history,
which consists of thought,
is not your true identity and is not the essence of who you are.
What is that space, that inner spaciousness?
It is pure consciousness,
the transcendent "I AM" that becomes aware of itself.
The Buddha calls it sunyata,
emptiness.
It is the "kingdom of heaven" that Jesus pointed to,
which is within you
here and now.

-- Eckhart Tolle

Thomas Merton, Essential Writings

From Jim Forest (on the little book, "Essential Writings"). I too, think that this collection of quotes are a pretty good synopsis of Merton's thought and spirit. I like the simple incisiveness of the quotes and the way in which they are compiled. Reminds me of why I always go back to Merton, again and again. Merton touches something in me that resonates, wakes me up some.

“The Christian must have the courage to follow Christ. The Christian who is risen in Christ must dare to be like Christ: he must dare to follow conscience even in unpopular causes. He must, if necessary, be able to disagree with the majority and make decisions that he knows to be according to the Gospel and teaching of Christ, even when others do not understand why he is acting this way… (p. 189).” 

 My first encounter with Merton was in 1969, when I was 19 years old investigating the pacifist roots of the Christian faith. I picked up Merton’s booklet entitled “Blessed Are the Meek: The Christian Roots of Nonviolence,” published by the Catholic Peace Fellowship. The entire contents of this booklet are included in these “Essential Writings.”) 

This volume is divided into three sections, in addition to the preface and a brief biography of Merton’s life: contemplation, compassion and unity. The selections are presented, more or less, in chronological order, giving the reader some insight into the development of his thinking over the years. I have a friend who says that Merton “went off the deep end” near the end of his life. But I dare say that my friend probably didn’t read what Merton wrote. This book assures me that Merton never strayed from the Christian tradition, even while trying to engage in dialogue with monks and mystics from other traditions.

Below are favorite quotes.

CONTEMPLATION

“For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self (p. 55).”

“Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul (p. 57).”

“There is another essential aspect of Christianity: the interior, the silent, the contemplative, in which hidden wisdom is more important than practical organizational science, and in which love replaces the will to get visible results (p. 67).”

“Ideally speaking, the hermit life is supposed to be the life in which all care is completely put aside (p. 68).”

“A Christian can realize himself called by God to periods of silence, reflection, meditation, and ‘listening.’…Perhaps it is very important, in our era of violence and unrest, to rediscover meditation, silent inner unitive prayer, and creative Christian silence (p. 73).”

“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 (p. 75).”

“The purest faith has to be tested by silence in which we listen for the unexpected, in which we slowly and gradually prepare for the day when we will reach out to a new level of being with God (p. 76).”

“If there is no silence beyond and within the many words of doctrine, there is no religion, only a religious ideology (p. 78).”

“He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world, without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others (p. 86).”

COMPASSION

“…we can no longer assume that because a man is ‘sane’ he is therefore in his ‘right mind.’ The whole concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their meaning is itself meaningless (p. 99).”

“The demonic sickness of Auschwitz emanated from ordinary people, stimulated by an extraordinary regime…(p. 103).”

“Christians must become active in every possible way, mobilizing all their resources for the fight against war. First of all there is much to be studied, much to be learned. Peace is to be preached, nonviolence is to be explained as a practical method, and not left to be mocked as an outlet for crackpots who want to make a show of themselves. Prayer and sacrifice must be used as the most effective spiritual weapons in the war against war, and like all weapons they must be used with deliberate aim: not just with a vague aspiration for peace and security, but against violence and against war. This implies that we are also willing to sacrifice and restrain our own instinct for violence and aggressiveness in our relations with other people (p. 106).”

“Thus we never see the one truth that would help us begin to solve our ethical and political problems: that we are all more or less wrong, that we are all at fault, all limited and obstructed by our mixed motives, our self-deception, our greed, our self-righteousness and our tendency to aggressivity and hypocrisy (p. 109).”

“For only love—which means humility—can exorcise the fear which is at the root of all war (p. 111).”

“I do not mean to imply that prayer excludes the simultaneous use of ordinary human means to accomplish a naturally good and justifiable end (p. 112).”

“So instead of loving what you think is peace, love other men and love God above all. And instead of hating people you think are warmongers, hate the appetites and the disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed—but hate these things in yourself, not in another (p. 114).”

“War is our enemy (p. 115).”

“The real crimes of modern war are committed not at the front (if any) but in war offices and ministries of defense in which no one ever has to see any blood unless his secretary gets a nosebleed (p. 120).”

“A nonviolent victory, while far more difficult to achieve, stands a better chance of curing the illness instead of contracting it (p. 122).”

“Christian nonviolence is not built on a presupposed division, but on the basic unity of man (p. 124).”

“And if the Spirit dwells in us and works in us, our lives will be continuous and progressive conversion and transformation in which we also, in some measure, help to transform others and allow ourselves to be transformed by and with others, in Christ (p. 125).”

“The beatitudes are simply aspects of love. They refuse to despair of the world and abandon it to a supposedly evil fate which it has brought upon itself. Instead, like Christ himself, the Christian takes upon his own shoulders the yoke of the Savior, meek and humble of heart. This yoke is the burden of the world’s sin with all its confusions, and all its problems. These sins, confusions and problems are our very own. We do not disown them (p. 134).”

UNITY

“If I can unite in myself…I can prepare in myself the reunion of divided Christians…If we want to bring together what is divided, we can not do so by imposing one division upon the other or absorbing one division into the other (p 141).”

“Every man, to live a life full of significance, is called simply to know the significant interior of life and to find ultimate significance in its proper inscrutable existence, in spite of himself, in spite of the world and appearances, in the Living God (pp. 144-145).”

“…those who travel most see the least (p. 145).”

“For my own part I consider myself neither a conservative nor an extreme progressive. I would like to think I am what Pope John was—a progressive who wants to preserve a very clear and marked continuity with the past and not make silly and idealistic compromises with the present—yet to be completely open to the modern world while retaining the clearly defined, traditionally Catholic position (p. 150).”

“Western civilization is now in full decline into barbarism (a barbarism that springs from within itself) because it has been guilty of a twofold disloyalty: to God and to Man (p. 152).”

“Since the Word was made Flesh, God is in man. God is in all men. All men are to be seen and treated as Christ (p. 152).”

“It is my belief that we should not be too sure of having found Christ in ourselves until we have found him also in the part of humanity that is most remote from our own (p. 153).”

“If the Lord of all took flesh and sanctified all nature, restoring it to the Father by His resurrection, we too have our work to do in extending the power of the resurrection to the whole world of our time by our prayer, our thought, our work and our whole life (p. 156).”

“We cannot love ourselves unless we love others, and we cannot love others unless we love ourselves (p. 157).”

“One must cling to one tradition and to its orthodoxy, at the risk of not understanding any tradition. One cannot supplement his own tradition with little borrowings here and there from other traditions. On the other hand, if one is genuinely living his own tradition, he is capable of seeing where other traditions say and attain the same thing, and where they are different. The differences must be respected, not brushed aside, even and especially where they are irreconcilable with one’s own view (p. 167).”

“…it is illuminating to the point of astonishment to talk to a Zen Buddhist from Japan and to find that you have much more in common with him than with those of your own compatriots who are little concerned with religion, or interested only in its external practice (p. 171).”

“…I think we have now reached a stage of (long overdue) religious maturity at which it may be possible for someone to remain perfectly faithful to a Christian and Western monastic commitment, and yet to learn in depth from, say, a Buddhist or Hindu discipline and experience (pp. 174-175).

EPILOGUE

“The Christian must have the courage to follow Christ. The Christian who is risen in Christ must dare to be like Christ: he must dare to follow conscience even in unpopular causes. He must, if necessary, be able to disagree with the majority and make decisions that he knows to be according to the Gospel and teaching of Christ, even when others do not understand why he is acting this way… (p. 189).”

Off the train, get off!

Blessed Franz Jagerstaater

Below is an excerpt from Daniel Berrigan's meditation -- Meditation on a Martyr, in Tribute to Franz Jagerstatter -- on the occasion of Jagerstaater's Beatification in 2007. 

Read the whole thing HERE. http://nightslantern.ca/meditation.htm

When asked how he could resist Hitler when his own bishops were telling him not to, Jagerstaater said that "they had not been give the grace to see ... "

Was he right in refusing to board the train, and others, who consented and climbed aboard, desperately wrong ? 

Maybe. But this is cold comfort, this proving something, 

he the winner, they the losers. 

Let us say rather, some of the passengers, since his death have undergone a change of heart, stepped down from this train. 

They have come on an insight, not a comforting one, but salutary. The quality of his Christianity; and their own. 

The difference; but also, through him, the possibility.  

The possibility of - faith. Bedrock. Faith in the living God. 

And of necessity; no more faith placed in the idolatrous state, the hideous 'fatherland', the 'volk'.   

That ragged solitary figure trudging alongside the train -he beckons them. 

Off the train, get off !   

To speak of today; it is no longer Hitler's death train we ride, the train of the living dead. Or is it ? 

It is. The same train. Only, if possible (it is possible), longer, faster, cheaper. On schedule, every hour on the hour, speedy and cheap and - unimaginally lethal. An image of life in the world. A ghost train still bound, mad as march weather, for hell. On earth.

See also:

Franz Jägerstätter: Letters and Writings from Prison

Blessed Franz Jägerstätter, enemy of the state

an enemy of the state

embracing beauty 

embracing beauty

August Diehl as Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian who refuses to pledge loyalty to Hitler, in “A Hidden Life.”Credit...Reiner Bajo/Fox Searchlight Pictures

This is what I reach for in my own life. Thank you Blessed Franz Jaegarstaater for showing the way.

NY Times Review: A Hidden Life: Refusing Hitler, Embracing Beauty

The arresting visual beauty of “A Hidden Life,” which was shot by Joerg Widmer, is essential to its own argument, and to Franz’s ethical and spiritual rebuttal to the concerns of his persecutors and would-be allies. 

The film is an affirmation of its hero’s holiness, a chronicle of goodness and suffering that is both moving and mysterious. ... 

Franz Jägerstätter’s defiance of evil is moving and inspiring, and I wish I understood it better.

God

Photo by Thomas Merton

“There is one more thing: I may be interested in Oriental religions, etc., but there can be no obscuring the essential difference-this personal communion with Christ at the center and heart of all reality. As a source of grace and life. “God is love” may be clarified if one says that “God is void” and if, in the void, one finds absolute indetermination and hence absolute freedom. (With freedom, the void becomes fullness and 0 = Infinity.) All that is “interesting”, but none of it touches on the mystery of personality in God, and His personal love for me. Again, I am void too, and I have freedom, or am a kind of freedom, meaningless unless oriented to Him.” 

- Thomas Merton (June 26, 1965) from A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals

He asked for nothing for himself

Talk about radical. Talk about prophetic and holy. I don't know if, in my lifetime, I have encountered a person quite as clear as Peter Maurin. So clear that he is somewhat hidden.

Even now, he's known mostly through Dorothy Day. Not directly.

This is the 70th anniversary of his death and NCR has an article.

https://www.ncronline.org/news/environment/peter-maurins-farm-rooted-vision-gains-ground-among-catholic-workers

"He asked nothing for himself, so he got nothing," Dorothy Day wrote in Loaves and Fishes of Peter Maurin.

Day once said that Maurin's dedication to voluntary poverty was so extreme that perhaps the only possession he really valued was his mind. (He eventually surrendered that as well, experiencing an apparent stroke that made him lose his ability to think clearly several years before his death.) When Maurin died May 15, 1949, he was buried in a donated grave, wearing a donated suit.

Like Jean Vanier, he found his way as a lay man.

The Wisdom of Tenderness

“In this communion, we discover the deepest part of our being: the need to be loved and to have someone who trusts and appreciates us and who cares least of all about our capacity to work or to be clever and interesting.”

The Peoples Pastoral

"Magisterium of the People," the latest documentary from Sebastian Gomes, was inspired by the Catholic Committee of Appalachia — nuns, priests, laypeople — who go into Appalachia to listen to the stories of the region's residents and report their findings in the form of a "People's Pastoral," playing on the church's name for an open letter from a bishop to his clergy and flock.

The group's most recent pastoral appeared in 2015, following two previous documents, in 1975 and 1995, which have been published as a book. The letters are, as the original People's Pastoral put it, a "telling of the story of 'the least among us' including Earth, our listening of that story, and the Church's response to it."

"It's always been hard for the institutional church to be prophetic," Stowe says in the film, "but I think because Francis speaks with such a prophetic voice it allows the other groups within the church who have been prophetic in their vision of things, and their way of listening to people the way CCA has done, they find a validation and an encouragement in that."

New documentary chronicles a grassroots Catholic 'magisterium'

I have to be the person that nobody knows

This article, Thomas Merton - Modern Monk, is in this week's New Yorker magazine.

Being a lifelong Merton reader and fan, I'm picky with many of the "about Merton" articles that appear. They seem to be just a little off, projecting an agenda or persona onto Merton that doesn't sit right with me. Not the Merton that I know.

That is the case with this article. The author (Alan Jacobs) is punchy and quick to draw conclusions right from the start --

"If he had continued to live in the world, he might have died not by electrocution but by overstimulation."

I googled Mr. Jacobs. He is a fine, and well regarded teacher and writer at a school in Texas, but talk about overstimulation. Take a look at his website, and venture, if you dare, into something called "bullet journalism"! Yikes. I can imagine Merton's rant. No wonder Jacobs' writing feels "punchy".

The New Yorker article gets worse before it gets better. I sort of like the way Jacobs presents Merton's struggle with "the world", politics, peacemaking, and world religions. But he doesn't quite get to the contemplative root of it all.

Anyway, toward the end of the article is an insight that I find quite remarkable. An insight that comes by way of Rowan Williams.

In 1978, marking the tenth anniversary of Merton’s death, a young Anglican theologian named Rowan Williams wrote, “Merton’s genius was largely that he was a massively unoriginal man.” And by “unoriginal” Williams means that Merton was not the kind of genius who was always himself, always some distinctive “original” force, but rather was “dramatically absorbed by every environment” that he found himself in. To which one might add: “absorbed by,” yes, but also “in conflict with.” Merton rebelled against Gethsemani’s discipline, but then he rebelled against the character of Clare College, too. Every environment shaped him profoundly, but he always found the shaping painful. He was always, in some sense, and down to the core of his being, at the mercy of his surroundings. 

This is why Williams focusses his inquiry on something Merton wrote in “The Sign of Jonas,” one of the first books he worked on after entering Gethsemani: “I have to be a person that nobody knows. They can have Thomas Merton. He’s dead.” Williams says, “Truth can only be spoken by a man nobody knows, because only in the unknown person is there no obstruction to reality: the ego of self-oriented desire . . . seeking to dominate and organize the world, is absent.” Williams believes that it is this distinctive absence that helps us to understand how Merton “could give almost equal veneration to Catholic and Buddhist traditions.”

And then Jacobs, still punchy, says this:

"He repeatedly affirmed a creed that can be stated in words, but was drawn to a discipline whose masters insist that Zen cannot be articulated. He was his contradictions: the person in motion who seeks stillness; the monk who wants to belong to the world; the famous person who wants to be unknown. ...

"He sought the peace of pure and silent contemplation, but came to believe that the value of that experience is to send us back into the world that killed us."

I think I would call it paradox, rather than contradiction. 

Jacobs is trying to put Merton into a box (or a bulleted list), and that's not going to work. I hope he reads some of Merton's poetry before writing about him again.

Here is the link to the New Yorker article. You need a subscription to the New Yorker, but the 1st 3 articles are free to read.

beautiful is the moment ...

"Beautiful is the moment in which we understand that we are no more than an instrument of God; we live only as long as God wants us to live; we can only do as much as God makes us able to do; we are only as intelligent as God would have us be."

- St. Oscar Romero

Prayer: Oscar Romero

Peace is not the product of terror or fear.
Peace is not the silence of cemeteries.
Peace is not the silent result of violent repression.
Peace is the generous, tranquil contribution of all to the good of all.
Peace is dynamism.
Peace is generosity.
It is right and it is duty.

- St. Oscar Romero


HT: John Predmore SJ

the authentic, courageous Gospel

Canonization of Oscar Romero and Paul VI, October 14, 2018

Today Óscar Romero (1917–1980) was named a saint by the Catholic Church. I woke up early and watched the live stream from the Vatican. Francis wore the same blood stained belt that Romero was wearing when he was killed. The quotes below are from St. Oscar Romero's homilies, gathered by Richard Rohr OFM. Whatever else is going on, this canonization feels like a good place and direction to me. This is a Church that is firmly rooted in reality (here, now, what is -- the world). It is a great gift to have this anchor in life.

 " ... the Christian faith does not cut us off from the world but immerses us in it." (St. Oscar Romero)

See also: The Political Dimension of Christian Love (Oscar Romero)
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The shepherd must be where the suffering is. [1]

My soul is sore when I learn how our people are tortured, when I learn how the rights of those created in the image of God are violated.  [2]

A Gospel that doesn’t take into account the rights of human beings, a Christianity that doesn’t make a positive contribution to the history of the world, is not the authentic doctrine of Christ, but rather simply an instrument of power. We . . . don’t want to be a plaything of the worldly powers, rather we want to be the Church that carries the authentic, courageous Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, even when it might become necessary to die like he did, on a cross. [3]

In his homily on March 23, 1980, the day before he was murdered, Romero addressed the Salvadoran military directly:

Brothers, we are part of the same people. You are killing your own brother and sister peasants and when you are faced with an order to kill given by a man, the law of God must prevail; the law that says: Thou shalt not kill. No soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. And it is time that you recover your consciences. . . . In the name of God, then, and in the name of this suffering people whose laments rise up to heaven each day more tumultuously, I plead with you, I pray you, I order you, in the name of God: Stop the repression! [4]

The next day, following his sermon, a U.S.-supported government hit squad shot him through his heart as he stood at the altar.

Only a few weeks earlier, Romero had said:

I have often been threatened with death. I must tell you, as a Christian, I do not believe in death without resurrection. If I am killed, I shall arise in the Salvadoran people. I say so without boasting, with the greatest humility. . . . A bishop will die, but God’s church, which is the people, will never perish. [5]

[1] Óscar Romero, Homily (October 30, 1977). See Through the Year with Óscar Romero: Daily Meditations, trans. Irene B. Hodgson (Franciscan Media: 2015, ©2005), 17.

[2] Homily (December 5, 1977). Ibid., 28.

[3] Homily (November 27, 1977). Ibid., 24.

[4] Homily (March 23, 1980). Ibid., 175.

[5] From a telephone interview with newspaper correspondent José Calderón Salazar. See James R. Brockman, Romero: A Life (Orbis Books: 2005), 247-248.

HT: Richard Rohr OFM