Category: Thomas Merton

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Heroic social witness

This quote comes from the Merton Institute’s weekly mail that I receive on Mondays. As you can see I’m a Merton fan and the Merton Institute keeps me thinking.

Though there is no use in placing our hopes on a totally utopian new world in which everyone is sublimely merciful, we are obliged as Christians to seek some way of giving the mercy and compassion of Christ a social, even a political, dimension. The eschatological function of mercy, we repeat, is to prepare the Christian transformation of the world, and to usher in the Kingdom of God. This Kingdom is manifestly “not of this world” (all forms of millennial and messianic Christianity to the contrary), but it demands to be typified and prepared by such forms of heroic social witness that makes Christian mercy plain and evident in the world….
Christian mercy must discover, in faith, in the Spirit, a power strong enough to initiate the transformation of the world into a realm of understanding, unity and relative peace, where [humankind], nations and societies are willing to make the enormous sacrifices required if they are to communicate intelligibly with one another, understand one another, cooperate with one another in feeding the hungry millions and in building a world of peace.

Thomas Merton. Love and Living. Naomi Burton Stone and Brother Patrick Hart, editors. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979): 219.

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Agnus Dei

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.

How often these words are with me and in particular lately. January 7, 1979 was my first visit to Abbey of the Genesee. I wanted to join the community at that point. I had recently read Thomas Merton’s “Seven Storey Mountain,” and was sure I was ready to be a Trappist.  I met with Fr. John Eudes that day and was disappointed when he suggested there were other ways for me to lead a spiritual life. I’ve often reflected on that wise counsel. I wouldn’t have made a good monk, but from that day to this I’ve tried to lead a spiritual life.  I’ve been a son, grandson, husband, and father and lead a spiritual life in all of those roles. Monasteries are not places to run away from life as I wanted to in early 1979. They are instead places where life is celebrated and where I’ve often returned for renewal.  The stillness of the abbey chapel still refreshes me like a mountain spring.  It is there that I once felt the healing presence of the Lamb of God and gradually over a number of years I’ve come to feel that presence in my home and elsewhere.

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Still don’t know

In just six days it’ll be three years since I started blogging. My first post on January 9, 2006 contained this quote from Thomas Merton.

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end.Nor do I re ally know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.- Thomas Merton, “Thoughts in Solitude

I still have no real idea of where I’m going and it really doesn’t matter. The more open I am to change the more successful I am. Openness and flexibility are signs of life while stiffness and rigidity are symptomatic of death and dying. I pray always to be open and in the words of the St. Irenaeus,

It is not thou that shapest God
it is God that shapest thee.
If thou art the work of God
await the hand of the artist
who does all things in due season.
Offer Him thy heart,
soft and tractable,
and keep the form
in which the artist has fashioned thee.
Let thy clay be moist,
lest thou grow hard
and lose the imprint of his fingers.

– St. Irenaeus

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True Contemplation

True contemplation is the work of a love that transcends all satisfaction and all experience to rest in the night of pure and naked faith. This faith brings us so close to God that it may be said to touch and grasp Him as He is, though in darkness. And the effect of such a contact is often a deep peace that overflows into the lower faculties of the soul and thus constitutes an “experience.” Yet that experience or feeling of peace always remains an accident of contemplation, so that the absence of this “sense” does not mean that our contact with God has ceased.

Thomas Merton. New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions Press, 1961): 211

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No man will ever see me again

That is how Thomas Merton describes his ultimate call to solitude. I just got through watching PBS’s Thomas Merton special. I’m glad I found it. I missed much of the program, but what I did see was interesting and informative. I drove to Abbey of the Genesee again today. I completed some of my Christmas shopping there. I like to give fruitcake and brownies to my co-workers and some of my business clients. It’s my way of saying thank you at this time of year. I picked up four fruitcakes, 3 loaves of chocolate chip cake, and five Monks brownies.

Thirty years ago on my first visit to the Abbey I wanted to join the community and was crestfallen when Abbot John Eudes Bamberger suggested that there were other ways to live a spiritual life. I wanted to run to the monastery at a time when life outside it seemed to much to bear. Today I’m glad the abbot prevailed. In the intervening years the abbey has come to live as much in my heart as in my head and the fruit of contemplation lives with me everyday. My own life is filled with solitude. I’m not quite a monk, but I live a life increasingly filled with calls to quietness.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av9sRpEVI6M]

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Gift of Solitude

I owe this quote to Gerry Straub’s blog. I keep coming back to Thomas Merton.

Today more than ever we need to recognize that the gift of solitude is not ordered to the acquisition of strange contemplative powers, but first of all to the recovery of one’s deep self, and to the renewal of an authenticity which is twisted out of shape by the pretentious routines of a disordered togetherness…. [We must] be first of all a person who can give himself because he has a self to give. And indeed, we cannot give Christ if we have not found him, and we cannot find him if we cannot find ourselves.” -Thomas Merton

Contemplation in a World of Action
[Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., Image Books, 1974 – pages 280-281]

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This is the place

Sometimes I question whether this is the place I’m supposed to be. I question whether I’m doing what I ought to be. This Merton quote puts some of that in perspective. I too like to listen to the wind and to live in as much silence as possible.

Everything about this hermitage simply fills me with joy. There are lots of things that could have been far more perfect one way or the other-aesthetically or “domestically”. But this is the place God has given me after so much prayer and longing-but without my deserving it. It is a delight. I can imagine no other joy on earth than to have such a place and to be at peace in it, to live in silence, to think and write, to listen to the wind and to all the voices of the wood, to live in the shadow of the big cedar cross, to prepare for my death and my exodus to the heavenly country, to love my brothers and all people, to pray for the world and for peace and good sense among men. So it is “my place” in the scheme of things. That is sufficient!

Thomas Merton. Dancing in the Water of Life. Robert E. Daggy, editor. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997: 209.

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It cannot be learned or taught

I remember when I used to look for all I could read about meditation. Imagine writing a book about Zen. Zen seems to be the antithesis of definition. When this quote came in today’s mail, it struck a chord with me.

Contemplation cannot be taught. It cannot even be clearly explained. It can only be hinted at, suggested, pointed to, symbolized. The more objectively and scientifically one tries to analyze it, the more he empties it of its real content, for this experience is beyond the reach of verbalization and of rationalization. Nothing is more repellent that a pseudo-scientific definition of the contemplative experience. One reason for this is that he who attempts such a definition is tempted to proceed psychologically, and there is really no adequate psychology of contemplation. To describe “reactions” and “feelings” is to situate contemplation where it is not to be found, in the superficial consciousness where it can be observed by reflection. But this reflection and this consciousness are precisely part of that external self which “dies” and is cast aside like a soiled garment in the genuine awakening of contemplation.

Thomas Merton. New Seeds of Contemplation. New York: New Directions Press, 1962: 6-7.

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A monks wisdom

Here’s something timely that came in the mail today from a Christian monk who died nearly forty years ago. How would the pundits describe him today?

People demand that the government “interfere” in nothing, just pour money into the armament industry and provide a strong police for “security”. But stay out of everything else! No interference in medicine, mental health, education, etc. Never was a country at once shrewder and less wise–shrewd in non-essentials and lunatic in essentials.

I have no doubt the world feels toward America the way many monks feel toward an abbot who wants to exercise total power, to receive unquestioning obedience on the basis of slogans about which he himself ceased thinking about twenty-five years ago, and who above all wants to be loved, so that he many never, at any time, to himself, seem to be exercising power, or loving it. Nobody denies him the power he has: few give him the love that he needs in order to be safe and content. And therefore he uses his power, from time to time, in unpredictable, arbitrary and absurd ways in which he defends his own ends and makes everybody miserable.

Thomas Merton. Turning Toward the World. Victor A. Kramer, editor. San Francisco: HarperSanFranciso, 1996: 259.

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Fall on the Allegany


Today was one of those lovely October days that invited me to stop at a public park along the Allegany River in the Village of Allegany, New York. I took the picture with my Blackberry Curve and it captures the beauty of my surroundings. I stopped at Dunkin’ Donuts across from St. Bonaventure University and purchased a small cup of coffee and then drove to this park just west of the campus. My head was filled with many thoughts as I walked to this spot. Once I was there I was filled with an overwhelming sense of peace and stability. As I sat here I thought of Thomas Merton who once taught at St. Bonaventure University before he entered the Abbey of Gethsemani in Bardstown, Kentucky in December 1941.