The Witness of Thomas Merton’s Inner Work
by Jonathan Montaldo
Presented to the Parliament of World Religions
The 18th century Japanese hermit, Ryokan, wrote this poem:
“Book after book you may read to advance your knowledge, But I ask you to read just one word of truth.
What is the one word of truth for your reading?
To read your heart as it truly is.”
Every thing that is beautiful, true and good exists in order that all creation, the rock and the river, the lion and the lamb, and all manner of human beings might have life together and have life more abundantly. Our minds seek what is beautiful, true and good as naturally as we breathe the air of this room. No word from us is necessary to engineer their presence. Beauty, Truth and Goodness are as intimate to us as blood streaming through our veins.
God, it has been written truly, is as close to us at every moment as the carotid artery that laces our necks. God the most merciful and compassionate, God who is Emptiness, God Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, God the Messiah who is to come, God who is Holy Wisdom and Mother of us all, God beyond all our conceiving God clings to our minds as sinews of flesh cling to bone. Nothing can change God's presence or intention to love us. Our right relations to God and to one another are established. We need only be mindful of ourselves as we already are: God-fashioned, God-seeking, desired by God to desire God. "God loves us and espouses us as God's own flesh " [Thomas Merton. A Search for Solitude, Journals, Vol. 3, p. 70]. We who sit in this room are one body. We have only to awaken our minds and realize it.
The date is June 29, 1968. Thomas Merton, a monk of Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky in North America, French by birth who for a time carried a British passport until he became a citizen of the United States after being a Trappist monk for eleven years, is writing in his journal. He has spent almost twenty-seven years practicing a monastic discipline in the Christian tradition. He is six months away from his death by accidental electrocution in Bangkok, Thailand. To the world he is an icon of success, his opinion sought by social activists, fellow monks, poets and seekers within religious traditions east and west. He is an internationally read author translated into twenty-eight languages. But looking over his shoulder at what he writes in his journal, we read words of one who sorrows, one who is unsatisfied, one poor human being although famous who still yearns to transcend the too narrow image of God he has carved for himself.
Thomas Merton, after twenty-seven years of monastic discipline, was not yet the monk, nor the Christian, nor the human being he had idealized himself yearning to be in his autobiographical writing. At the top of a 10,000-foot pole of fame, Merton counted his golden reputation as dross in the face of his need for more inner work. He needed to "de-form" his hardened identities as monk, poet and social-commentator so as to reform his mind by imprinting it with the universal and fluid sufferings of all other creatures. He needed to identify his mind ever more deeply with the mind of his Christ, the Christ who humbled himself so that God could be conceived as the Most Accessible of Neighbors. Merton knew that his inner work was more important than anything he could teach or witness to others by mere words.
In his journal entry for June 29, 1968, he comments on his reading of the eighth-century Buddhist scholar Shantideva whose writing described the inner work necessary to become a Bodhisattva:
- "I am spending the
afternoon reading Shantideva, in the woods near [my]
hermitage-the oak grove to the southwest-a cool,
breezy spot on a hot afternoon. Thinking deeply
of Shantideva and my own need of discipline. What
a fool I have been, in the literal and biblical
sense of the word: thoughtless, impulsive, lazy,
self-interested yet alien to myself, untrue to
myself, following the most stupid fantasies,
guided by the most idiotic emotions and needs.
Yes [being human] I know, it is partly
unavoidable. But I know too that in spite of all
contradictions there is a center and a strength
to which I always have access if I really desire
it. The grace to desire it is surely there.
"It would do no good to anyone if I just went around talking-no matter how articulately-in this condition. There is still so much to learn, so much deepening to be done, so much to surrender. My real business is something far different from simply giving out words and ideas and "doing things"-even to help others. The best thing I can give to others is to liberate myself from the common delusions and be, for myself and for [others], free. Then grace can work in and through me for everyone.
"What impresses me most-reading Shantideva-is not only the emphasis on solitude but [his] idea of solitude as part of the clarification [necessary for] living for others: [the] dissolution of the self in "belonging to everyone" and regarding everyone's suffering as one's own. This is really incomprehensible unless one shares something of the deep, existential Buddhist concept of suffering as bound up with the arbitrary formation of an illusory ego-self. To be "homeless" is to abandon one's attachment to a particular ego-and yet to care for one's own life (in the highest sense) in the service of others. A deep and beautiful idea [in Shantideva when he writes:]
"'Be jealous of your self and afraid when you see your self is at ease and your sister is in distress, that your self is in high estate and your sister is brought low, that you are at rest and your sister labors. Make your self lose its pleasures and bear the sorrow of your fellow human beings.
[The End of the Journey. Journals Vol. 8., pp. 135]'"
Shantideva's words reminded
Merton again that his years of monastic discipline were
only preparation to receive the grace that would cut the
knot of his ego's distorting conceptions and free him to
identify his true self with the selves of all who suffer.
In his journal writing especially Merton discloses the
nature of his inner work as he confesses his evasions of
the task to efface himself in deeper communion with the
anxiety of his fellow beings. Thomas Merton is a
spiritual teacher whose words will benefit new
generations in the 21st century because he never lost the
docility of a student who knows by deep experience that
he is not wise. Seeking God, Merton continually displaced
his mind on a journey to deeper mind and to a deeper
communion with all that is true, good and beautiful: the
enfleshment of God in all things.
Thomas Merton's memoirs made him famous. The Seven Storey
Mountain, the narrative of his journey from a homeless
prodigal to one who found his nest at a Trappist
monastery in Kentucky, remains in print today since 1948.
In the twenty years that followed this best-seller until
his death in 1968, Merton wrote volumes of poetry,
popular books on the spiritual life, and hundreds of
essays engaging his wide, passionate interests:
contemplative traditions East and West, world literature,
politics and culture, social justice and world peace. His
magazine articles fill fifteen large volumes. His
collected letters to the famous and to just plain folks
nears ten thousand items. Seventy working notebooks on
his reading prove he studied as carefully as he wrote.
Six hundred audio taped conferences to his monastic
novices highlight his gifts as a teacher. Among all these
things and more that are archived at the Thomas Merton
Center at Bellarmine College in Kentucky most revelatory
of Merton's gift for communication are his private
journals. Twenty-nine years of personal journals exist
from 1939, when Merton was fresh from Columbia University
in New York City until just two days before his death.
These journals are, in his own words, his art "of
confession and witness." They are his testaments of
a poet's "heart work," of a scholar's "inner
work, of a monk's "work of the cell." His
journals provide a window for its reader to view, over
his shoulder, the necessary struggle of us all to
transform our consciousness from self concern with
securing ourselves in the world to selfless
identification with all that is fragile and transitory.
Merton's journal writing and its lessons fall within the
genre of monastic wisdom literature. Unless we change our
hearts and become new beings by inner work, our outer
work with and for others in community contributes only to
prolonging the endless cycles of bondage and despair.
Without the continuing inner work of exorcising the
distorting conceptions of an isolated, private self, the
community's distorting conceptions of itself can never be
exorcised. Institutions cannot be changed unless we who
create and maintain institutions are transformed. Our
lofty calls to guiding institutions [the core document of
the World Parliament in South Africa] are authentic only
as we commence and sustain the conversion of our own
misguided hearts.
It is true that Merton publicly called upon institutions
within the West, and especially within his own North
American culture, to renovate themselves according to the
social principles embedded in the Judeo-Christian
scriptures. But his monastic tradition and his own
experience taught him that his calling upon institutions
to reform themselves would only be heard if it came from
one who was attempting to reform himself. The teacher who
is not first humbled and judged by his own words of
instruction to his society is a false pedagogue and
rightly ignored. The transformation of his own
consciousness had to proceed in tandem with his call for
a transformation of institutional structures.
He
explained the dynamic balance between inner and outer
work in a published journal, Conjectures of A Guilty
Bystander:
- "Since I am a [human
being], my destiny depends on my human behavior:
that is to say, upon my decisions. I must first
of all appreciate this fact, and weigh the risks
and difficulties it entails. I must, therefore,
know myself, and know both the good and the evil
that are in me. It will not do to know only one
and not the other: only the good, or only the
evil. I must then be able to love the life God
has given me, living it fully and fruitfully, and
making good use even of the evil that is in [the
life God has given me]. Why should I love an
ideal good in such a way that my life becomes
more deeply embedded in misery and evil?
"To live well myself is my first and essential contribution to the well being of all mankind and to the fulfillment of [humanity's] collective destiny. If I do not live happily myself how can I help anyone else to be happy, or free, or wise? . . .
"To live well myself means for me to know and appreciate something of the secret, the mystery in myself: that which is incommunicable, which is at once myself and not myself, at once in me and above me. From this sanctuary [of the mystery in myself], I must seek humbly and patiently to ward off the intrusions of violence and self-assertion. . . . .
"If I can understand something of myself and something of others, I can begin to share the work of building the foundations for spiritual unity. But first we must work together at dissipating the more absurd fictions that make unity impossible
[Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, pp. 81-82]."
The work of building the
foundations of spiritual unity, according to Merton,
begins by piercing through the fictions that attend our
lives and work. The fiction, for example, that we who
attend this Parliament must dissipate is that this
gathering constitutes in fact a parliament of our
religions. Religions do not congregate in parliaments,
persons do.
We owe it to reality for each of us to pierce
the corporate veil of this Parliament and remind
ourselves that, behind every formal declaration are our
human faces, behind every institutional mask is an
awkward coalescing of us struggling for coherence and
meaning. Our formal, strategic plans are abstractions of
our anxious desires for harmony out of chaos. Behind
every rigid dogma we corporately create is a chorus line
of us the lame that only wants to dance.
Our kind, our
poor human kind on no matter what continent, no matter
living in a village nor a metropolis, dearly loves the
fictions and the cages we construct, not only to protect
us from the strangers beyond our borders but from the
unacknowledged resident aliens within our own hearts.
The significance of
Merton's inner work for our learning was his life-long
effort to uncage his mind. Grounded in his Christianity
and naturally unable to abandon his deep roots in Christ,
Merton uncaged his mind with Christ to push outward
toward a more catholic light by studying contemplative
traditions of the Far and Middle East. He uncaged his
mind by the practice of desiring to learn from all
expressions of God-seeking. Merton's inner work freed him
from any one-source theories of what it means to love God
and serve one's neighbor. By study, by prayer, by
solitude and by writing journals Merton softened his
heart and made himself pliable for the grace that would
free him from self-delusions so as to be more free for
others. He summed up the essence of this inner work in
his journal:
Thomas Merton and His Holiness the XIVth
Dalai Lama (India, 1968)
- "If I can unite in
myself, in my own spiritual life, the thought of
the East and the West, of the Greek and Latin
Fathers, I will create in myself a reunion of the
divided Church, and from that unity in myself can
come the exterior and visible unity of the Church.
For, if we want to bring together East and West,
we cannot do it by imposing one upon the other.
We must contain both in ourselves and transcend
them both in Christ
[A Search for Solitude. Journals, Vol. 3, p. 87].
"This European born and educated monk strove to uncage his mind from the distorted perspectives of a western, mono-cultural approach to human realties and relations. Merton's inner work could be characterized almost wholly by the desire to free himself and help others free themselves from the distortions of their education, their national heritage, their tribe, any entity that divides human persons into family and strangers. Deeply embedded himself in a total institution where monastic rules, constitutions and an abbot directed every aspect of its members lives, Merton rejected anything that denied any person's inviolate freedom even in God's name. He believed that the first, legitimate duty of every institution was to contribute to the personal freedom of every human being. Freedom, for Thomas Merton, was inseparable from religion. True religion, he wrote, nurtured
- "Freedom from
domination, freedom to live one's own spiritual
life, freedom to seek the highest truth,
unabashed by any human pressure or any collective
demand, the ability to say one's own "yes"
and one's own "no" and not merely to
echo the "yes" and the "no"
of state, party, corporation, army or system.
This is inseparable from authentic religion. It
is one of the deepest and most fundamental needs
of [the human person], perhaps the deepest and
most crucial need of the human person as such….
The frustration of this deep need [for freedom]
by irreligion, by secular and political pseudo-religions,
by the mystiques and superstitions of
totalitarianism, have made [us] morally sick in
the very depths of [our] being. They have wounded
and corrupted [our] freedom, they filled [our]
love with rottenness, decayed it into hatred.
They have made man a machine geared for his own
destruction
[Conjectures of A Guilty Bystander, p. 77]."
Thomas Merton has been called a
"spiritual master" and publishers of his books
claim that he was one of the twentieth century's most
significant theologians. He was indeed a gifted writer
and teacher whose wide-ranging evocation of what it feels
like to lead an examined inner life marked by intense
prayer rightly attracts all those who seriously seek God.
But Merton's great gift to his readers is that his
monastic discipline and inner work did not allow him to
confine the contradictory parts of himself into leak-proof
compartments. He always acknowledged in his journals the
disturbing conceptions that attended his mind's religious
journey. His right hand always knew what his left hand
was doing. His genius for honesty in his journals and his
urge to make his contradictions more transparent reveal
to his reader how dark and hard is the long, graced road
to inner freedom. His transparency in his journals reveal
to his reader that his life was no metaphor for mastering
the Spirit but rather a paradigm of being mastered by the
Spirit as his ego slowly dissolved into identification
with the suffering of everyone else. Merton wrote
journals to undermine his guru status. He allowed the
honesty of his journals to convince him and his readers
that he was nobody's "answer," not even his own.
But Thomas Merton was no virtual monk. His was a literal
quest to find himself gathered by God's mercy, a mercy he
knew by hard experience he could never bequeath to
himself. He literally sought to live for "God Alone."
He literally desired to find himself hidden in the "secret
of God's face." Merton's tears and his expressions
of sorrow in his journal writing would have been
pathological had they not proceeded from his literal
desire to obey God's voice and go, as he put it,
- "clear out of the
midst of all that is transitory and inconclusive
[and return] to the Immense, the Primordial, the
Unknown, to Him who loves, to the Silent, to the
Holy, to the Merciful, to Him Who is All
[Turning Toward the World, Journals, Vol. 4, p. 101]."
Merton was, like every one of
us, a complex human being. The mystery of his inner
complexity, the diverse expressions of his person as he
responded to the world and its ten thousand things were
as puzzling to him as the mystery of our own inner
complexity makes each of us puzzles to ourselves. Like us
he imagined that achieving unity of experience and
clarity of self-expression would be metaphors for
entering the presence of God. But he was so multi-faceted
a person that a consistent, clear expression of himself
to himself escaped him. He was always a stranger to
himself, full of new and paradoxical possibilities.
When
Merton corresponded with his closest friends in letters,
where he could be most heard and be most himself, he
hinted at this inner diversity by playfully signing his
letters with different names. He signed his letters
variously as: Roosevelt, Homer, Wang, Demosthenes, Joey
the Chocolate King, Ottaviani, Henry Clay, Harpo,
Cassidy, Moon Mullins, and Frisco Jack [see The Man in
The Sycamore Tree by Ed Rice and A Catch of Anti-Letters
by Merton and Robert Lax]. His two most significant
names, his name in religion, Father Louis, and his
writer's name, Thomas Merton, were symptomatic of the
more deeply divided self-presentations of who he was.
Early in his monastic life he believed that the writer
Thomas Merton had to die if Father Louis the monk was to
live.
He had, just as you and I have, a chorus of
expressions of himself, some harmonious, some discordant,
and he wondered how all of these expressions could be him.
He consciously questioned which of all these names and
expressions of himself were true and which were false.
Which of his many self-presentations were his "true
self?"
Casting the dilemma within Merton's Christ-consciousness,
did God the Father love only a single expression of his
personality? Did the Father demand a paring down of
Merton's personality into a monochromatic purity? Or was
the Father's love for him as fecund and complex as the
fecund complexity of Merton's self-expressions? Did the
Father in fact love most these opposing energies of
identity that played themselves out in Merton's life and
art?
The great inner work to be accomplished in each
person's solitude and prayer is the acceptance of the
unaccepted contradictions at the ground of our self-presentations.
Inner work is a work of integrating these contradictions
so as to live with them and out of them as our way of
taking our part in the life given us by God. By inner
work we learn to rejoice in God's creativity and to
perceive the inner wholeness that binds all opposites.
Our religious traditions at their most authentic should
free us to find traces of God in all things. God loves
all manner of our being in the world and has made all
things in harmony. God wills us to recognize the hidden
consonance of all that is apparently opposed within
ourselves and within our societies.
As in our inner work,
so our communal work for justice and peace is futile if
we insist on the primacy of one form of being human over
another, of one religion over others, or by choosing a
mono-cultural path toward Joy for all beings that share
this planet. God loves our infinite diversity and has
choreographed an ordered dance of different stars.
The old and the new, the one and the many, the small and
the large: our gathering in South Africa is a metaphor
for this ballet of opposing energies that course through
all of us. We have come to South Africa not to merge but
to allow our polar energies to converge and simply dance.
We have come to Cape Town to place our minds and our
bodies proximate to one another, to be in close vicinity
to strangers not from our country, to strangers not
sharing our religious mind-set, to those outside of our
conditioned perspectives. Our physical togetherness in
Cape Town is indeed the triumph of our religious
imaginations. We are hoping, despite all our real
diversities, that we are dancing together on the waves
that push us toward the same shore.
We have spoken millions of words among ourselves during
these Cape Town days together but perhaps what has been
more important than our words and our seriousness and the
gravity of our solemn declarations has been our simply
being together in all our diversity and mystery. Merton
would conjecture that God loves less our words and loves
more the pauses, the silences between our words. Only
within the intervals of our silences, when we finally
have nothing left to say or can say no more, do our
hearts become attentive to the vocabulary of the one
language being spoken among us. Only in the humble
silences between our words can we recognize beyond all
words the common tongue of yearning for freedom that
unites us. In the pauses we will find the beat to which
God conducts the music of our Cape Town days. When our
surface minds speaking themselves endlessly finally go
silent in exhaustion, then the deeper reality of our
inner minds can forget their shyness, reveal themselves
and come out to dance.
In final paragraphs to his classic book, New Seeds of
Contemplation, Merton evoked the metaphor of our being
together and with God as "the general dance:"
- "What is serious to
human beings is often trivial in the sight of God.
What in God might appear to us as "play"
is perhaps what God takes most seriously. God
plays…in the garden of creation, and, if we
could let go of our obsessions with what we think
is the meaning of it all, we might be able to
hear God's call and follow God in God's
mysterious, cosmic dance. "We do not have to
go very far to catch echoes of that dancing. When
we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance
we see the migrating birds in autumn descending
on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we
see children in a moment when they are really
children; when we know love in our own hearts; or
when, like the Japanese poet Basho we hear an old
frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash---…the
awakening, the turning inside out of all values,
the "newness," the emptiness and the
purity of vision that makes themselves evident [at
such times], provide echoes of the cosmic dance.
"For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life…the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But it does not matter, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance that is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood whether we want it to or not
[New Seeds of Contemplation, pp. 296-297].
Thomas Merton's inner work
helped him to rejoice in being a member of the human race
in which His God had become incarnate. His inner work
insured that the "sorrows and stupidities of the
human race" could never overwhelm him once he
realized "what we all are." His deepest inner
work made him inarticulate and full of awe and silent for
there was "no way of telling people that they are
all walking around shining like the sun [Conjectures of A
Guilty Bystander, pp.141-142]."
By the witness of his own inner work made manifest to us
in his private journals Thomas Merton encourages all of
us to write ourselves into the Book of Life by coming to
terms with our hearts just as they truly, mysteriously
are. Merton knew his personal dilemmas were universal. He
knew we all long to live our lives beyond the boundaries
of our parochial selves but that we fear the exhibition
of our infinite possibilities. He knew we all hide the
mystery of our heart's complexities not only from the
world but also from ourselves.
The common vocation to
which each of us is called is the inner work by which we
learn that at Life's banquet we eat the same food as
everyone else. We learn by inner work to take our place
at Life's infinitely long table and humbly receive the
sacrament of our life's particular moments. By inner work
we learn to time-share with everyone our universally
precarious human existence through which everyone falters
forward in alternating patterns of celebration and tears.
The inner work of each human heart can become a metaphor
of hope that nothing is God's poor, unloved creation. We
are called upon by inner work to share God's love for all
fragile and transitory creatures that mirror God's
infinite possibilities, to share God's love, that is, for
our fragile, transitory selves.
May Thomas Merton's art of confession and witness
continue to benefit humankind. May my interpretation of
his words this afternoon have done no harm. But let words
pale and let my tongue be silent before the quiet reality
of just how good, true and beautiful it has been to sit
together in this small room in South Africa with the
world and God in our bloodstream.
_______________
Jonathan Montaldo, director of the Thomas Merton Center
at Bellarmine University, delivered this address on December
7, 1999.
Parliament of World Religions at Cape Town, South Africa
All rights are reserved.