the root of Christian love

For some years now, I've been getting a morning email from Wayne Burns, with a quote from Merton. Lately, they have seemed especially simple yet profound to me. This one was from this morning. I love the turning of emphasis away from something that we are supposed to "do", and the reaching to a deeper, before source of love.

"The root of Christian love is not the will to love, but the faith that one is loved. That faith that one is loved by God. That faith that one is loved by God although unworthy -- or, rather, irrespective of one's worth."

(NEW SEEDS OF CONTEMPLATION, page 75)

"we and our world interpenetrate"

[Below are some of my thoughts surrounding Merton’s writings on “the world”. Though I have kept this blog mostly informative about the life, art, friendships, and writings of Merton, I also consider him my primary spiritual guide, and am continually musing upon what he says. It’s quite personal. So I have decided to try to articulate some response here, without getting scholarly. Comments are welcome and wonderful. In time, I might develop some kind of more personal "style" for this blog - maybe find my voice :-)]

“We and our world interpenetrate”.

This is an important insight for me. The world is not something that is “out there”, while my own life and spirituality is somehow “in here”.

Life in a monastery is attractive to me. Even the religions that isolate themselves from the “public life” of the world (Anabaptists) have a certain appeal to me. In a way this distancing is a protest and refusal to be pulled into a reality that defines itself in terms of money, power, business, or political advantage.

When 27-year-old Merton entered the monastery he did, indeed, think that he was leaving the world behind. He vowed to struggle against the will to power and individualism within his own psyche.

Obviously, some kind of distance and discipline is necessary. Modern life is filled up with movement and activity, with speech, news, communication, recreation, distraction. Billboards everywhere invest this frantic activity with the noblest of qualities – as if it were the whole end and happiness of man. As if our meaning were to be found somewhere outside of ourselves, in what we own or achieve or do.

Ancient and traditional societies, East and West, have always recognized that wisdom involved a “way” of spiritual discipline in which an inner meaning of being could be attained.

So, there must be some kind of deliberate turning away from the world, turning inward – and yet it cannot be an evasion or fleeing from the world.

“This way of wisdom is no dream, no temptation and no evasion, for it is on the contrary a return to reality in its very root. It is not an escape from contradiction and confusion for it finds unity and clarity only by plunging into the very midst of contradiction, by the acceptance of emptiness and suffering, by the renunciation of passions and obsessions with which the whole world is “on fire.” It does not withdraw from the fire. It is in the very heart of the fire, yet remains cool, because it has the gentleness and humility that comes from self-abandonment, and hence does not seek to assert the illusion of the exterior self.” (from “Honorable Reader”, p. 67)

About halfway through his monastic vocation, Merton began turning back toward the world, becoming fully informed, engaged and responsive to the crises of his times. His prophetic protesting was balanced by his more personal writings, where he revealed himself mostly as a poet of his inner experiences.

Some have called Merton “a man with and uncaged mind”, one who was free of the “obligatory answers” proscribed by educations, racial and national heritages, religious tribes, or institutions that thrive by dividing human beings into family and strangers.

My sense is that Merton’s monastic inner work led him to an awareness of a personal freedom that is available to all of us. Inherent in this freedom is the ability to dance between (bridge) the outer and inner dimensions of how we know reality – our world and ourselves.

choosing to love the world - 5

The way to find the real “world” is not merely to measure and observe what is outside us, but to discover our own inner ground. For that is where the world is, first of all: in my deepest self. … This “ground,” this “world” where I am mysteriously present at once to my own self and to the freedoms of all other men, is not a visible, objective and determined structure with fixed laws and demands. It is a living and self-creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to which I am myself my own unique door. When I find the world in my own ground, it is impossible for me to be alienated by it.

[CWA, 170]

choosing to love the world - 4

Only when we see ourselves in our true human context, as members of a race which is intended to be one organism and “one body,” will we begin to understand the positive importance not only of the successes but of the failures and accidents in our lives. My successes are not my own. The way to them was prepared by others. The fruit of my labors is not my own: for I am preparing the way for the achievements of another. Nor are my failures my own. They may spring from the failure of another, but they are also compensated for by another’s achievement. Therefore the meaning of my life is not to be looked for merely in the sum total of my achievements. It is seen only in the complete integration of my achievements and failures with the achievements and failures of my own generation, and society, and time. It is seen, above all, in my own integration in Christ.

[No Man is An Island: p. 16]

the Burial of Herman Hanekamp

This is too good not to share here. It is this week's reflection from The Merton Institute:

[The following entry from Merton's private journals describes the funeral of Herman Hanekamp, who did not succeed as a novice at Gethsemani, but who was allowed to live on Linton Farm, a property the Abbey owned. When Herman moved in, Merton wrote: "He came over in the rain with all his possessions in a mule cart. It was a pathetic sight." Many at the Abbey considered Hanekamp a "character" and a "bum". But Merton attests, perhaps seriously, that, of all the members of Gethsemani's community he had known to that point, he would have most wanted to be like Herman.]

This morning I went to the funeral of Herman Hanekamp in New Haven. Started out in the frost after dawn. The body laid out in the funeral parlor was that of a millionaire, a great executive. I never before saw Herman shaven, in a suit,
least of all, in a collar and tie. He looked like one of the great of the earth.
I was a pallbearer along with Andy Boone, Hanekamp's old friend Glen Price (a great stout man with a lined face like the side of an old building but very humble and gentle). Brothers Clement and Colman were pallbearers and another man with a shoelace necktie. . . .

When we came out of the church into the sun, carrying the coffin, the bright air seemed full of great joy and a huge freight train came barreling through the valley with a sound of power like an army. All the pride of the world of industry seemed, somehow, to be something that belonged to Herman. What a curious obsession with the conviction of him as a great, rich man, tremendously respected by the whole world! We drove back to bury him in the graveyard outside the monastery gate.

The bare woods stood wise and strong in the sun as if they were proud of some great success that had been achieved in secret with their connivance and consent.

As we carried the coffin through the sunlit yard, I listened with exaltation: it was hailed by the singing of skylarks on the second day of January. What has triumphed here is not admired by anyone, despised even by the monks who also could not help thinking of Herman as a lazy man and an escapist. He had not taken seriously the world of business so important to us all. And now behold--a captain of industry!

Thomas Merton. A Search for Solitude. Edited by Lawrence S. Cunningham (San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco, 1996): 245.

Thought for the Day

Herman, who was once a novice here (in the days before the first world war) is one of the very few members or former members of the community that I have ever had any desire to imitate.

[A Search for Solitude: 242]

choosing to love the world - 3

The world as pure object is something that is not there. It is not a reality outside us for which we exist. It is not a firm and absolute objective structure which has to be accepted on its own inexorable terms. The world has in fact no terms of its own. It dictates no terms to [us]. We and our world interpenetrate. If anything, the world exists for us, and we exist for ourselves. It is only in assuming full responsibility for our world, for our lives and for ourselves that we can be said to live really for God.

[CWA, 169]

choosing to love the world - 2

If I had no choice about the age in which I was to live, I nevertheless have a choice about the attitude I take and about the way and the extent of my participation in [my age’s] living ongoing events. To choose the world is not then merely a pious admission that the world is acceptable because it comes from the hand of God. It is first of all an acceptance of a task and a vocation in the world, in history and in time. In my time, which is the present. To choose the world is to choose to do the work I am capable of doing, in collaboration with my brother and sister, to make the world better, more free, more just, more livable, more human. And it has now become transparently obvious that mere automatic “rejection of the world” and “contempt for the world” is in fact not a choice but an evasion of choice. The person, who pretends that he can turn his back on Auschwitz or Viet Nam and acts as if they were not there, is simply bluffing.

(Contemplation in a World of Action: pp. 164-165)