Wisdom-Sophia in the Life and Prayer of Thomas Merton.”
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“Wisdom-Sophia in the Life and Prayer of Thomas Merton.” “God permit that the symbol of my life be a candle, that spends itself, that consumes itself while there is still wax to burn; when nothing more remains to be consumed, that my flame, yet an instant, dare to remain alive and afoot, to rumble after, happy in the conviction that one day the force of Right will conquer the pretended right of force." How much the force of Right seems to be conquered in our times by the pretended right of force. During his address to the US Congress on September 24, 2015, Pope Francis lifted up Thomas Merton as one of four “great” Americans who “offer us,” as he put it, “a way of seeing and interpreting reality” that is life-giving and brings hope. The others were Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Dorothy Day. For many Catholics like myself, who have long admired all four but especially look to Merton and Dorothy Day as exemplary models of Catholic intellectual and spiritual life, it was a thrilling moment: that Pope Francis would celebrate Merton and Day in such a context was quite extraordinary. It suggests something, I think, not only about Merton and Day but also about Pope Francis: that is, it throws light on the kind of witness that Pope Francis believes we need most in our times, as we face an uncertain future. Francis described Merton as a man of paradoxes, “a man of prayer, a thinker who challenged the certitudes of his time and opened new horizons for souls and for the church. He was also a man of dialogue, a promoter of peace between peoples and religions.” Though he didn’t say it on this occasion, the pope might have also lifted up Merton’s legacy as a peacemaker between human beings and the Earth: Merton the contemplative who gives us, if you will, a spirituality of the earth, who reminds us of the elemental communion we share with the soil and water, the wind and sunlight, with all creatures on our fragile planet. I/ The Song of Faith 1 I’d like to begin with a passage that introduced me to the rhythms of faith as I first discovered them in Merton’s life, and eventually, my own. I was just 15 when my mother put an old copy of The Sign of Jonas into my hands, and a few days later I came to a meditation called “Fire Watch, July 4, 1952,” one of the most-celebrated meditations in Merton’s vast body of work. [It begins with Merton putting on his sneakers. ascends to the tower.] [slide] And now my whole being breathes the wind which blows through the belfry, and my hand is on the door through which I see the heavens. The door swings out upon a vast sea of darkness and of prayer. Will it come like this, the moment of my death? Will you open a door upon the great forest and set my feet upon a ladder under the moon, and take me out among the stars? Even today, when I sink into “Fire Watch,” it is like walking into the church of my childhood: the words steady my pulse, deepen my breath, slow my mind, and open my imagination. [slide] Mists of damp heat rise up out of the fields around the sleeping abbey. The whole valley is flooded with moonlight and I can count the southern hills beyond the watertank, and almost number the trees of the forest to the north. Now the huge chorus of living beings rises up out of the world beneath my feet: life singing in the watercourses, throbbing in the creeks and the fields and the trees, choirs of millions and millions of jumping and flying and creeping things. I lay the clock upon the belfry ledge and pray cross-legged with my back against the tower, and face the same unanswered question. Lord God of this great night: do You see the woods? Do You hear the rumor of their loneliness? Do you behold their secrecy? Do You remember their solitudes? Do You see that my soul is beginning to dissolve like wax within me? 2 “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” writes the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Merton’s lesson is: “Pay attention, you might miss it.” Like the biblical prophets and poets of old, Merton calls us back to ourselves in God, in one another, in the natural world, before it is too late. II/ Son of a Century [slide] Already some sixty years ago, Merton had described the world we inhabit as a “post- Christian” world. “Peace in a Post-Christian Era” was the title of the book he had prepared for publication but which the Trappist censors judged too controversial to publish. And no wonder. Merton confronted his contemporaries with some very uncomfortable questions: Does faith have a future? If so what kind of faith will it be? Faith in God? Faith in the markets? Faith in technology? Faith in atomic weaponry, drone strikes and the national security state? Fundamentalist faith, which is to say, faith not in God but in our idea of God, in the absolute truth of one’s own faith, all others be damned? As a parent, as a teacher and Catholic theologian, these are questions I think about a lot, and which I’d like to offer for our conversation today. What kind of faith might kindle a fire of love and hope, of God’s own hope, in the next generation? I don’t pretend to have an answer to these questions, but what I’d like to do is lay down some markers with Merton as our guide. What is striking to so many readers is the degree to which his life and writings, so shaped by events of the twentieth century, still resonate so powerfully today, as Pope Francis suggests. Indeed, Merton’s story emerges as a kind of lucid window into the journey itself of seeking, and being found, by God. Pope Francis described Merton as a man of paradoxes, “a man of prayer, a thinker who challenged the certitudes of his time and opened new horizons for souls and for the church. He was also a man of dialogue, a promoter of peace between peoples and religions.” But as you and I know, Merton did not become these things all at once, nor perfectly, without risk and error. Merton’s journey in faith was a lifelong journey, and at times a terrific struggle. As a model for Christian 3 holiness, he was far from perfect. He was a restless monk, who often chafed against his vows of stability and obedience. In his later years he would distance himself from his more pious earlier writings—including the autobiography that made him famous in 1949, The Seven Storey Mountain— insisting on his right not to be turned into a myth, a kind of porcelain saint, for the edification of Catholic school children. Not a few Catholics were angered at his writings on race, the Cold War and the peace movement. What emerges I think for most readers from the broadest tapestry of his life is a beautifully human journey before God, like ours, beautiful in its imperfections and struggles. Williams: “The great Christian is the man or woman who can make me more interested in God than in him or her. Merton is a great Christian because he will not let me look at him for long: he will, finally, persuade me to look in the direction he is looking, toward a world everywhere haunted by God”—toward God and human possibilities. Of course, as with any classic writer, every reader will have a different favorite book or passage that hooked them or still haunts their imagination. For me it was “Fire Watch,” and later New Seeds of Contemplation and, perhaps my favorite, Raids on the Unspeakable, which gives us Merton, I think, at his most mature and prophetic best. For many readers of my parents’ generation it is his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, which marks a pivotal signpost or even a major turning point in their life’s journey. An elder African American woman and former nun in my parish told me that Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander was her “Bible” during the 1960s, when she was an activist for racial justice and felt increasingly alienated by her religious community. “Merton got it,” she said to me, “when few others did.” [By which I took her to mean: few other white Catholics.] The renowned Jesuit peace activist Fr. Daniel Berrigan likewise remembers Merton’s role as “pastor to the peace movement” in those years. “It was a long, hard road, and we needed help along the way, and he gave it. He was very important to all of us.” 4 III/ God with Us [slide] Perhaps Merton’s most-oft cited passage comes from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, when he describes an extraordinary moment in March of 1958, when he was standing on a busy street corner in Louisville, KY, and suddenly it is as if scales falls from his eyes. In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness.