Thomas Merton (1915–1968)

Beautiful, insightful little book on the nature of Christian monasticism. Wasn’t sure what to expect when I picked up this book on a whim from my local used book store, other than a dim awareness that Merton wasn’t your typical “Christian” writer. What I found was a book that is partially an explanation of the principles that underlie the monk’s way of life, partially a description of how these principles manifest in various monastic orders.

Even as a non Christian, I could still see the universal significance of the ideas Merton writes about. This is probably because Merton is concerned not only with dogma and liturgy, but how true adherence to the principles of Christian faith manifest in the real world, and how our society as it stands has fallen so far from those principles. You know you are dealing with a real one when Merton decries the way the “totalitarians” and “capitalists” have deformed modern man, or how a monk that pretends to mere bourgeois values can never reach true spiritual purity. Merton recognizes that society as it stands is lacking, and is unsustainable in the long term. The monastic life provides not only the conditions for a closer relationship with god, but also a model for the way man can organize his relationship with his environment, his tools, his work, and his fellow human beings. A monk shares in the work of the cloister, never slacking but also always allowing for plenty of time for contemplation and rest. Mutual aid is a requirement of the communal like style in the cloister, but a monk must always respect the solitude and space of another. A monk is encouraged to take up a creative exploit and devote time to its mastery. A monk lives simply and without extraneous things; the possessions he does own, he treats with the care and dignity befitting tools made to do God’s work.

One might see the monastic lifestyle as meaningless asceticism, a wholesale denial of a big part of what it means to be human; Merton would argue (I think convincingly) that the excision of all unnecessary things makes space for the sliver of human existence that truly makes a life significant, a sliver that has all but been buried by the modern world.… (more)

Two things in Shannon’s note in this edition propelled me to begin this book. First, Merton may have been a product of or perhaps even drawn to the post Reformation, pre Vatican II arrogance of the Church that led it to promote an exclusionary, limiting interpretation of the Gospels. And what attracts and emboldens him to believe and profess his faith through our shared body of the Church? Second, how does the issuance of a human child ever in our faith get deemed something so horrific as to be revealed only in a “tell-all” version of his life, how can it reasonably be labeled a “disaster” for him and the unmarried women?

I’d like to read a forward written perhaps in the pen of the ‘disastrous’ child. A man, especially a religious one, who avoids the privilege of knowing, acknowledging, and supporting his own blood cannot, in my opinion, be trusted to carry the full message of Christ. No child in a classroom, a boardroom, or the theatre of life would or should ever imagine having to introduce themselves as a bastard, a disaster, a secret, or the unwanted product of a so-called aspiring Man of God. Women, mothers certainly do not and cannot hide from such accomplishments, i.e. bringing a life into this world. So I would call his posture in reference to this child a “social abortion” and no less and perhaps more unfortunate that a bona fide abortion. What is it exactly that is so secret, disastrous, or so shameful about a child born as to warrant being rejected by the Franciscan Order or public opinion or him? This escapes me entirely.

I expect to read in the remainder of Merton’s book of someone who is preoccupied with scrubbing his earthly life dry of the pitfalls of everyday humanness. Why bother? There is no sin so original, after all, other than that of Adam and Eve, that anyone should imagine they have invented, a frailty so novel that they can’t be forgiven or make amends. To run from one’s own ‘failures’ so assuredly while pursuing a Christ-like life, then, it seems to me, is a profound disservice to the gift of being human and accessing the grace of God in the first place.

I’ll update my review. If I can finish his missive. Lord, give me strength.… (more)