Encounters with Merton: Spiritual Reflection

by Henri J. M. Nouwen

Overview

Encounters with Merton brings together two of the 20th century's most important and articulate Christian voices. Henri Nouwen explores themes of solitude, nonviolence, and the encounters between Eastern and Western spirituality as presented by Merton.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780824599119
Publisher:	PublishDrive
Publication date:	03/01/2017
Sold by:	PUBLISHDRIVE KFT
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	939 KB

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CHAPTER 1

From Sarcasm to Contemplation

Today we know Thomas Merton as one of the most impressive contemplatives of our time. Yet in his youth, we find him more a sardonic and witty spectator, in whom the seeds of contemplation only gradually come to fruition. Even more than his detailed autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, which Thomas Merton wrote in Gethsemani, his diary The Secular Journal unveils for us the life of the young Merton. In this diary, written long before it was published, we find the direct, spontaneous reactions of a young intellectual who does not yet know whether the world is to be loved or ridiculed.

The short, fragmentary diary lets us see Thomas Merton as an intelligent, well-read, and well-traveled "graduate," who with poignant sarcasm perceives his surroundings and gives his commentary on them. Most noticeable in the Journal, perhaps, is the somewhat brutal nonchalance with which he criticizes the "stage" of the world. Nevertheless, by reading it we quickly recognize its writer to be an exceptionally sensitive young man, one who, parentless since his sixteenth year, was constantly searching, through travel and books, for something or someone to whom he could give his full dedication.

Distant Perception

When Merton, almost twenty years after writing this diary, prepared the foreword for its publication, he said:

Certainly the views and aspirations expressed, at times, with such dogmatic severity, have come to be softened and tempered with the passage of time and with a more intimate contact with the spiritual problems of other people. I hope I may be forgiven for having allowed some of my youthful sarcasms to survive in these pages. (Journal, 8)

It is perhaps good that he did not scrap this sarcasm, because it gives us possibly the best introduction to his contemplative spirit. We find a delightful example of Merton's view of his surroundings in his ironic description of the reaction of museum visitors to a painting by Breughel. He writes:

But what were the people saying about this picture? Two girls, art students probably: "It looks like one of the early French Impressionists." One Killer-of-a-Fellow, with a mob of female admirers: "Excellent reporting: look at those knees." (The knees were very knobby.)

One of two girls (giggling): "Look at them kissing, there."

A man: "That one's drunk, I guess."

Another Killer: "You can tell it's a Dutch painting: not a skinny one in the whole bunch."

A man (foreign accent): "Country dance!"

A woman: "Look at those white aprons."

A man: "Some paunch!"

A man: "Look at the pipers."

There were a lot of people who just read off the name, "Broo-gul," and walked on unabashed. But at least they must have thought it important. They came across with the usual reaction of people who don't know pictures are there to be enjoyed, but think they are things that have to be learned by heart to impress the bourgeoisie: so they tried to remember the name. (Journal, 29)

That is the young Merton. With a distant grin he observes his fellow men and women around him. Sarcasm gets the better of him.

But this early sarcasm is certainly not implacable cynicism, for it can quite easily turn into violent indignation. In the room with the painting of El Greco he heard a woman say, "They're all dying of TB," and he wrote:

Of course there were plenty of comments on the misery and unhappiness of the age the painter lived in. What would be the good of turning around and asking the old lady: "If the world was dying then, what do you suppose it is doing now, in this age of hypochondriacs and murderers and sterilizers? How about our pictures, are they dying of anything? Or can they be said to die, when they can't even come to life in order to do so?" (Journal, 30)

Merton wrote this when he was twenty-three. Five years later he was a Trappist, and today he is rightly described as one of the most important spiritual writers of the twentieth century. It is surely true that the distant perception that appears in this diary has two sides. Distant perception leads to razor-sharp observation, which can lead to cynicism and bitterness; but it also can give rise to generous contemplation, which is the source of real care and human concern.

Merton had not yet experienced conversion and purification. But in the progress recorded in this diary, we see a deep earnestness, which in the beginning is still somewhat hidden, come more and more to the foreground. The first pages are filled mostly with critical commentary on the books that he had read, the paintings that he had seen, and the philosophies that inspired him. The gospel serves more to preserve all this at a certain playful distance than to let him feel deeply involved in his world. He wrote on William Blake, Dante, James Joyce, and Graham Greene, on Fra Angelico, Breughel and El Greco, on St. Thomas and St. Augustine with a pointedness but also with the somewhat free-wheeling ease of a snobbish student. Scarcely two years a Catholic, he observed the world through the eyes of an enthusiastic but still naive convert.

Thus he traveled to Cuba, where he glorified in rich poetical terms the life of Havana and made a fiery plea for the genuineness of the Spanish religiosity in contrast to the superficiality of American thought. His Cuban diary perhaps belongs with the best prose he ever wrote.

Choices

Back in New York, his journal tells us he busied himself again with writers, painters, and philosophers, until on April 7, 1941, on a trip to Gethsemani he wrote: "I should tear out all the other pages of this book, and all the other pages of anything else I have ever written and begin here" (Journal, 155). That sounds like the cry of a man who suddenly sees himself and his world in their true form. As if unmasking his ironic distance and discovering it to be vanity, he wrote: I wonder if I have learned enough to pray for humility. I desire only one thing: to love God. Those who love Him, keep His commandments. I only desire to do one thing: to follow his will. I pray that I am at least beginning to know what that may mean. Could it ever possibly mean that I might some day become a monk in this monastery? (Journal, 172)

The impact of this new experience was profound. Back in New York he seemed to have lost orientation. He mocked his interest in literature: I am amazed at all the novels I read between the ages of seventeen and twenty. I was never able to swallow Hardy, although I read practically everything else, D. H. Lawrence, Stella Benson, Virginia Woolf, John Dos Passos, Jules Romains, Hemingway, Balzac, Flaubert, Celine, even some short stories by Stefan Zweig, some Vicki Baum, and the other day when I was sitting in the sun I remembered with embarrassment how I tried to explain to my godfather why I liked Luciano Zuccoli's bad pornographic novel La Divina Fanciulla. I said it was "very Italian." I have read enough novels, and I don't want to read any more. Also, I think the novel is a lousy art form anyway. (Journal, 183)

The people around him became riddles to him. He didn't speak of them anymore with a mocking smile, but in despairing ignorance. "I have never been more convinced than now that I see absolutely no sense in what people do" (Journal, 16). His novel My Argument with the Gestapo, which he wrote in the summer of 1941 after his visit to the Trappists, is like a long litany, with the refrain: I can't understand them: the soldiers who fight, the sailors who drown, the Germans who attack, the English who defend, the people who busy themselves, I cannot understand them. What is the sense in what people do? (see Argument, 55–56).

The more we love earthly things, reputation, importance, ease, success and pleasures, for ourselves, the less we love God. –Merton

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Detachment in poverty offers the unheard-of chance to stand without fear in a violent world. –Nouwen

In between he worked and lived at St. Bonaventure's College but constantly questioned whether this kind of teaching was the way he wanted to follow Christ. He felt the contradiction between the rich St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue and the poor black children of Harlem. He went to Harlem to work, but distrusted his motives. Wasn't this a compromise? Wasn't something more being demanded of him? Harlem or the Trappists? The choice preoccupied him, but it didn't make him anxious. He laughed at his busy past and wrote:

No need for anything new, or for any excitement whatever. If I pray, either I will change my mind or I will not [about going to work in Harlem]. In any case, God will guide me. No need to be up in arms, no need to be anything other than what I am — but I will pray and fast hard. No more excitements, arguments, tearing of hair, trips to Cuba and grandiose "farewell world" gestures. No need for anything special — special joy or special sorrow, special excitement or special torment. Everything is indifferent except prayer, fasting, meditation and work. (Journal, 216)

Still, his work in Harlem did not keep his thoughts about Gethsemani from haunting him. On November 27, 1941, he wrote: "Why doesn't this idea of the Trappists leave me?" He answered his own question: "Perhaps I cling to my independence, to the chance to write, to go where I like in the world." Finally he writes:

But going to the Trappists is exciting, it fills me with awe and desire. I return to the idea again and again: "Give up everything!" (Journal, 222–23)

With these words The Secular Journal closes, and with them, the life of the young Merton. Two weeks later he reported to Gethsemani to begin a spiritual journey, one whose intensity and fascination make the many other journeys described in The Seven Storey Mountain seem like child's play.

FOR MEDITATION

On God's nature

It is said that while the Germans were desecrating a church somewhere in Poland, some German sergeant, cockeyed with the excitement, stood up in front of the altar and yelled out that if there was a God He would want to prove His existence at once by striking down such a bold and important and terrifying fellow as this sergeant. God did not strike him down. The sergeant went away still excited, and probably the unhappiest man in the world: God had not acted like a Nazi. God was not, in fact, a Nazi, and God's justice (which everybody obscurely knows about in his bones, no matter what he tries to say he thinks) is inexpressibly different from the petty bloodthirsty revenge of Nazis. (May 21, 1940, Journal, 99)

On popular opinion

In this situation, where there are hundreds of people with no real faith, who don't really believe anything much, long inquiries are constantly being carried out as to what various persons "believe." Scientists, advertising men, sociologists, soldiers, critics, are all asked what they believe inasmuch as they are scientists, advertising men, etc. Apparently there is a separate belief appropriate to every walk of life. Anyway, they all answer with brisk one-thousand-word articles stating some opinion or other that they have picked up somewhere. The result is enough to make you break down and sob. (May 30, 1940, Journal, 116–17)

On the reasons for peace

We have no peace because we have done nothing to keep peace, not even prayed for it! We have not even desired peace except for the wrong reasons: because we didn't want to gethurt, we didn't want to suffer. But if the best reason we have for desiring peace is only that we are cowards, then we are lost from the start, because the enemy only sees in our cowardice his first and most effective weapon. (June 25, 1940, Journal, 121–22)

On our guilt

When I pray for peace I pray for the following miracle. That God move all men to pray and do penance and recognize each one his own great guilt, because we are all guilty of this war, in a way. [Leon] Bloy says somewhere, of a murderer, that all the people were a tree of which this murderer was only one of the fruits, and that applies to Hitler: We are a tree, of which he is one of the fruits, and we all nourish him, and he thrives most of all on our hatred and condemnation of him, when that condemnation disregards our own guilt, and piles the responsibility for everything upon somebody else's sins! (February 22, 1941, Journal, 164–65)

On the religious life

The religious life exists and thrives not in buildings or dead things or flowers or beasts but in the soul. And there it exists not as a "good feeling" but as a constant purpose, an unending love that expresses itself now as patience, now as humility, now as courage, now as self-denial, now as justice, but always in a strong knot of faith and hope, and all of these are nothing but aspects of one constant deep desire, charity, love. (April 8, 1941, Journal, 190)

On nothingness

We must long to learn the secret of our own nothingness (not God's secret first of all, but our own secret). But God alone can show us our own secret. Once we see it, we can seek to receive His love into our hearts, and we can desire to become like Him. Indeed, by His love we can begin to become like ourselves — that is, we can find our own true selves, for we are made in His image and likeness. (April 10, 1941, Journal, 197)

On annihilation

The measure of our identity, or our being (for here the two mean exactly the same thing) is the amount of our love for God. The more we love earthly things, reputation, importance, ease, success and pleasures, for ourselves, the less we love God. Our identity gets dissipated among a lot of things that do not have the value we imagine we see in them, and we are lost in them: we know it obscurely by the way all these things disappoint us and sicken us once we get what we have desired. Yet we still bring ourselves to nothing, annihilate our lives by trying to fulfill them on things that are incapable of doing so. When we really come to die, at last, we suddenly know how much we have squandered and thrown away, and we see that we are truly annihilated by our own sick desires: we were nothing, but everything God gave us we have also reduced to nothing, and now we are pure death. (September 3, 1941, Journal, 243–44)

CHAPTER 2

The Way to Silence

Once inside the walls of the Trappist abbey in Kentucky, Merton undertook a difficult path. Yet besides what we have discussed in the first chapter, there were various signs that brought him there. These were books, people, and events — all of which made an impression on a young man, born of very artistic parents, already many years an orphan, constantly traveling between France, England, and the United States. It is not surprising that we are dealing here with a man who was a searching person. He sought a place where he could feel at home, he sought an insight by which to bring order to the endless series of opposing ideas that poured over him in his various schools, and he sought after beauty that could give him the satisfaction he had fleetingly found in the many things that were presented to him as art.

The influence of the books, people, and events that brought Thomas Merton to Gethsemani can be understood only if we keep in mind his intense personality, which registered with a maximum sensitivity everything that he read, saw, and experienced, always posing the question as large as life itself: "What can I say 'yes' to, without reserve?"

Books

When Thomas Merton entered Columbia University in 1935, he was already very well read. In the London milieu, to which his godfather had introduced him, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Celine had become very familiar names to him. But there are two books especially that brought him to a deeper level of knowledge than the London literary circle: The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy by Etienne Gilson and Ends and Means by Aldous Huxley.

With a sense of humor, Merton told how thankful he was that he hadn't thrown Gilson's book out the train window when he discovered to his great surprise the "Nihil obstat — imprimatur" and became conscious, to the point of aversion, that it was a Roman Catholic book.

From Gilson, Merton learned of the concept aseitas. Merton wrote:

In this one word, which can be applied to God alone, and which expresses His most characteristic attribute, I discovered an entirely new concept of God — a concept which showed me at once that the belief of Catholics was by no means the vague and rather superstitious hangover from an unscientific age that I had believed it to be. On the contrary, here was a notion of God that was at the same time deep, precise, simple and accurate and, what is more, charged with implications which I could not even begin to appreciate, but which I could at least dimly estimate, even with my own lack of philosophical training. (Mountain, 172)

(Continues…)

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Copyright © 1981 Henri J. M. Nouwen.
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Table of Contents

Publisher's Note,
Preface to the Second Edition, by John Eudes Bamberger, O.C.S.O.,
Abbreviations,
Introduction,
A Short Biography,
1. From Sarcasm to Contemplation,
2. The Way to Silence,
3. Conquering Solitude,
4. Unmasking the Illusion,
5. Discovery of the East,
Merton's Prayer,
Acknowledgments,
Index of Names,