The Merton Center

I don't know why it took me so long to get to The Merton Center in Louisville. I've been in and out of KY several times over the years. I have a very good friend who lives within walking distance to the Bellarmine campus. I even stay over night with her, and her husband is a professor at Bellarmine.

Anyway, I finally got there this past autumn, and enjoyed everything I saw there. All of Merton's books, audios of his talks to the novices, many, many photos (both his photos and those taken of him). Photos of his brother, John Paul. His Calligraphies. Original typed manuscripts. The statue of the Virgin and Child he had Jaime Andrade sculpt. His denim jacket. The icon. The stole Pope John XXIII sent to him. It's all there.

All of my photos are on a Flickr site HERE.

I am so late getting this up because I have been very ill the last few months. 

a meditation on Jesus Christ by Daniel Berrigan

1. The gospel of Jesus is spoken in a world
intoxicated with death
mesmerized by death
convinced of the necessary rule of death
technologizing death
acceding to the omnipresence of death
2. And Jesus says No
to this omnivorous power.
So his word makes the slight
all but imperceptible difference
(which is finally the only difference).
A good man, himself powerless,
stands at the side of powerless men
and says to death No
for them for himself.
3. Can any of you
place before you a single child, smiling
squirming in your arms; and say
The death of this child is a fact of modern war; I accede
to that death. I regret it of course
but what can one do? We have to destroy
in order to save; villages, women, children,
The system traps us all...
4. The system; horrible word! Can the system
trap the conscience of a free man?
Traps are for animals; freedom is for men.
I cannot speak for you
but I will not wait upon Caesar
to instruct me in God's word.
I am a man. I can read:
If a man will save his life, let him lose it.
I say to you love your enemies, do good to those who hate you.
Whatever you do to the least of these my brothers, you do to me.
Blessed are you who suffer persecution for justice's sake.
5. Jesus had nothing to say to "systems",
except to deny their power over him.
He said in effect, violence stops here (pointing to his body)
He said in effect, it is better to die for others
than to live (live?) in a trap.
6. Be concrete, be immediate!
Imagine the world!
If you embrace a child, can you consent
to the death of a child? each human face
leads you (follow!) to every human face.
7. I can only tell you what I believe.
I believe I cannot be saved by foreign policies.
I cannot be saved by sexual revolutions.
I cannot be saved by the gross national product.
I cannot be save by nuclear deterrents.
I cannot be saved by aldermen, priests, artists,
plumbers, city planners, social engineers,
nor by the Vatican,
nor by the World Buddhist Association
nor by Hitler nor by Joan of Arc
nor by angels and archangels,
nor by powers and dominations
8. I can be saved only by Jesus Christ.
9. Take this book with you, please
into the midst of children old men and women
the poor, the defeated, the innocent.
Carry it about with you, let it speak
wherever men struggle, suffer, abandon hope,
Let the book happen to you.
It has no other reason for being,
A man
very like yourself
first spoke the words of these pages,
"a man
acquainted with grief,
like us in everything, save sin alone."
He is as near to you/ as your next drawn breath.
10. I do not know
where my life leads.
Do you know where your life leads?
The next note is not struck.
The hands (foul, cleansed) hover
over the instrument.
My friends ask me: After jail, what?
You too (my friends) start awake at midnight,
question the silent lover beside,
the dream-wrapped child;
where? what next?
11. Lover, child, in the immense dignity
of birth or death refuse an answer.
There is no answer.
The genius of the gospel is in the name of man
to refuse an answer.
We had best go forward/ as those in love go
Exulting
in the breadth of the swath love opens
the sound of a scythe at harvest
the soundlessness of children sleeping
a universe
of unanswerable grandeur!
12. If we have awakened to the world
it is probable that our salvation is near.
If we abide in love
we shall be greatly loved.
13. I believe that twelve just men, believing
against all evidence,
may stir the soil or sea
with toilers' hands, bring up intact
something flowerlike, something -
Jesus,
that direct and life-giving man
waits on you.
The world waits on you.
The two statements
are quite simply verified.
Close then open your eyes.

- first published as the foreword to Quotations from Chairman Jesus, compiled by David Kik and published by Templegate for $1.95 in 1969. The book was subsequently reissued by Bantam.

Merton and the counterculture

"Jerusalem" by Thomas Merton

Merton to beat poet/publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 8/61:

“Someday I want to talk to you about effective protest as distinct from a simple display of sensitivity and goodwill. I think we have to examine the question of genuine and deep spiritual non-cooperation, non-participation, and resistance. … [Just] standing up and saying with sincerity, candor, and youthful abandon “I am against it” has the following bad effects: a) it perpetuates an illusion of free thought and free discussion, which is actually very useful to those who have long since stifled all genuine freedom in this regard, b) it flatters the [establishment] by giving them something they can contrast themselves with, to their own complacent advantage.”

Merton to Nicaraguan poet Napoleon Chow, 5/63:

“It also seems to me that the protest of the beatniks, while having a certain sincerity, is largely a delusion. … Yet this much can be said for them: their very formlessness may perhaps be something that is in their favor. It may perhaps enable them to reject most of the false solutions and deride the “square” propositions of the decadent liberalism around them. It may perhaps prepare them to go in the right directions. I think the beats have contributed much to the peace movement in the US, in their own way, and they are quite committed to the only serious revolutionary movement we have: that of rights for the Negro.”

HT: Gordon Oyer

Your Darkness (no-man's land)

King Minos, Thomas Merton art

But oh!
How far I have to go to find You in Whom I have already arrived!
For now, oh my God, it is to You alone that I can talk,
because nobody else will understand.
I cannot bring any other on this earth
into the cloud where I dwell in Your light,
that is,
Your Darkness,
where I am lost and abashed.

I cannot explain to any other
the anguish which is Your joy
nor the loss which is the possession of You,
nor the distance from all things
which is the arrival in You.
nor the death which is the birth in You
because I do not know anything about it myself
and all I know
is that I wish it were over
-- I wish it were begun.

You have contradicted everything.
You have left me in no man's land.

- Thomas Merton
Dancing in the Water of Life, page 175, excerpted

Poetry and Contemplative Life

Photo of Thomas Merton by Eugene Meatyard

An article by Thomas Merton appeared in the July 4, 1947 issue of Commonweal Magazine and was recently republished. The topic: Poetry and Contemplation. This was something that Merton, poet & monk, supposedly knew something about. In fact, Merton struggled with articulating the relationship between art and religion ("... there is an abyss between them ..."). He seems (to me) to slide from one side to the other, never quite recognizing the authentic synthesis of monk & artist that he, himself, embodied so well. As did his friends Robert Lax and Ad Reinhart (see louie post: "Art is Art, Everthing Else is Everything Else") 

Below are some excerpts from the 1947 Commonweal article. It is good, but it is still early Merton. He will continue to develop this theme for the rest of his life, both in his writing and his living. Read the whole article  HERE.

"The term “contemplative life" is one that is much mistreated. It is more often used than defined, and that is why arguments about the respective merits of "active" and ''contemplative" orders generally end nowhere. In the present article, I am not talking about the contemplative orders, but about the contemplative life. It is a life that can be led and, in fact, must eventually be led by every good Christian. It is the life for which we were created, and which will eventually be our everlasting joy in heaven. By the grace of Christ we can begin to lead that life even on earth, and many in fact do so begin. Some of them are in cloisters, because the vows and rules of religious orders and congregations make the necessary work of preparation easy and, as it were, almost a matter of course. But many more "contemplatives" are out in the world. A lot of them may be found in places like Harlem and wherever people suffer, and perhaps many of these have never even heard the word "contemplative." And yet, on the other hand, not all of those who are in contemplative orders are contemplatives. Through their own fault they miss the end of their vocation. 

"The contemplative life is a life entirely occupied with God—with love and knowledge of God.
... 

"We have said that the poetic sense may be a remote disposition for mystical prayer. This needs explanation. And the first thing that needs to be stressed is the essential dignity of esthetic experience. It is, in itself, a very high gift, though only in the natural order. It is a gift which very many people have never received, and which others, having received it, have allowed to spoil or become atrophied within them through neglect and misuse. 

"To many people, the enjoyment of art is nothing more than a sensible and emotional thrill. They look at a picture, and if it stimulates one or another of their sense-appetites they are pleased. On a hot day they like to look at a picture of mountains or the sea because it makes them feel cool. They like paintings of dogs that you could almost pat. But naturally they soon tire of art, under those circumstances. They turn aside to pat a real dog, or they go down the street to an air-conditioned movie, to give their senses another series of jolts. Obviously for such people art is not even a remote preparation for even the lowest degree of contemplation. 

"But a genuine esthetic experience is something which transcends not only the sensible order (in which, however, it has its beginning) but also that of reason itself. It is a supra-rational intuition of the latent perfection of things. Its immediacy outruns the speed of reasoning and leaves all analysis far behind. In the natural order, as Jacques Maritain has often insisted, it is an analogue of the mystical experience which it resembles and imitates from afar. Its mode of apprehension is that of "connaturality"—it reaches out to grasp the inner reality, the vital substance of its object, by a kind of affective identification of itself with it. It rests in the perfection of things by a kind of union which somewhat resembles the rest of the soul in its immediate, affective contact with God in the obscurity of mystical prayer. A true artist can contemplate a picture for hours, and it is a real contemplation, too. So close is the resemblance between these two experiences that a poet like Blake could almost confuse the two and make them merge into one another as if they belonged to the same order of things. And yet there is an abyss between them."

HT: Claire - A Seat At The Table

collect

drawing by Thomas Merton

Beloved Spirit, You are all the prudence and the power

That change our dust and nothing into fields and fruits;

Enfold our lives forever in the compass

   of Your peaceful hills.

- Thomas Merton, Life and Holiness, p 68-69

above the level of thought

drawing by Thomas Merton

"The months have gone by, and You have given me peace, and I am beginning to see what it is all about.  I am beginning to understand.

"You have called me to Gethsemani not to wear a label by which I can recognize myself and place myself in some kind of category.  You do not want me to be thinking about what I am, but about what You are.  Or rather, You do not even want me to be thinking about anything much: for You would raise me above the level of thought.  If I am always trying to figure out what I am and where I am and why I am, how will that work be done?

"I do not make a big drama of this business.  I do not say: “You have asked me for everything, and I have renounced all.”  I no longer desire to see anything that implies a distance between You and me.  If I stand back and consider myself and You, as if something had passed between us, from me to You, I will inevitably see the gap between us and remember the distance between us."

- Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain, p. 421

no more fuss about being a contemplative

drawing by Thomas Merton

"My God, I give up my attachment to peace, the delight and sweetness of contemplation, of Your love and Your presence.  I give myself to You to love Your will and Your honor alone.

"I know that, if You want me to renounce the manner of my desiring You, it is only in order that I may possess You surely and come to union with You.

"I will try from now on, with Your grace, to make no more fuss about “being a contemplative,” about acquiring that perfection in myself.  Instead I will seek only You, not contemplation and not perfection, but You alone.

"Then maybe I will be able to do the simple things that You would have me do, and do them well, with a perfect and pure intention in all peace and silence and obscurity, concealed even from my own self, and safe from my poisonous self-esteem."

-Thomas Merton, Entering the Silence, pp. 77-78

vocation to solitude

Drawing by Thomas Merton

"Vocation to Solitude – To deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea, or desert; to sit still while the sun comes up over the land and fills its silences with light.  To pray and work in the morning and to labor in meditation in the evening when night falls upon that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and with stars.  This is a true and special vocation.  There are few who are willing to belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into their bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence, and to turn the very substance of their life into a living and vigilant silence."

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, p. 101

What we have to be is what we are

drawing by Thomas Merton

The passage below is excerpted from a wonderful talk given by Jonathan Montaldo in Rome in July 2012 (posted on his blog, Monkswork).

He’s right - readers of Merton are not just peering into the life of someone who searched for God and an authentic life, they are following Merton’s invitation to enter the mystery of their own lives.  Merton’s words point toward something Other than himself.  I especially like Jonathan’s use (below) of the phrase: “un-walled-up human beings”.

... May Merton’s witness mentor our confidence to accept our inexhaustibly rich vocation to be fully alive as joy-filled, compassionate and un-walled-up human beings. A month before his death in Bangkok, Thailand by accidental electrocution on December 10, 1968, Thomas Merton gave his contemplative life’s project an unintended final summary in a talk he gave in Calcutta, India:

"I stand among you as one who offers a small message of hope, that first, there are always people who dare to seek on the margin of society, who are not dependent on social acceptance, not dependent on social routine, and prefer a kind of free-floating existence under a state of risk. And among these people, if they are faithful to their own calling, to their own vocation, and to their own message from God, communication on the deepest level is possible.

"And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear brothers and sisters, we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. So what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are. "
 

Thomas Merton. The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton. Edited by James Laughlin, Naomi Burton Stone and Brother Patrick Hart (New York: New Directions, 1973): 307-308

afternoon poem

march 20/64        kalymnos

this is the afternoon and so it is time to make
a poem of the afternoon, to come up from
under it with a long sigh and to swing into it
from above: the afternoon, the golden time:
to have no subject but the world, life and the
world, life in the world, the texture of life, the
texture of every minute as it passes

this is the afternoon and so it is time to make
a poem of the afternoon (the afternoon is
making a poem of itself)

afternoon, the afternoon, the people stand on
the sunlit quay and wait for the kanaris.

they stand on the quay and wait for the boat:
the kanaris to arrive ...

- Robert Lax, journal C/tagebuch C.PV, 1990, p. 8