Simon wrote:
"This" is our humanity. "This" is not the way we summon the Name. "This" is the way we summon our ragged humanity.
The question is, of course, what connection exists between the Name and our ragged humanity.
Your post made me think of Thomas Merton who reminds me in some ways of LC. It was at the urging of a Hindu that Merton began to examine his Catholic roots.
His Columbia Education and the rather wild life, he led there, and apparently earlier at Oxford is still fodder for much speculation. It is said that almost one half of his autobiography,
The Seven Storey Mountain, was censored by the Trappist Order.
I've mentioned an article, by Jim Knight,
The Thomas Merton We Knew about the influence that Merton had on Knight and their mutual friend, Edward Rice from their school days at Columbia.
Once Merton had been ordained a monk, it seems that the connection between the holy and the secular becomes confused. Knight writes:
We met him at his Ordination ceremony, and afterwards spent two days with him.
It was a great pleasure to see him, and at the same time a curious experience.
Suddenly, this old drinking companion of mine back in college, this wild man
I once had known, was Father Thomas Merton; well, actually, Father Louis,
which was the name he took as a monk. It was a hard thing to cope with,
you don't know what to say, you don't know how to approach him. But we managed.
And, Merton, also in his prayer ceremonies seems to adopt a formal approach, Knight writes here:
"I also visited him about ten years later at the small hermitage
that he had been permitted to have built in the forest,
outside the main monastery. He lived there alone. It was rather primitive, unheated,
without a toilet, no kitchen. He would get up each day at about 2 a.m. and
then go through a lengthy Trappist routine of prayers. He would meditate before the
face of God like a Sufi Master, as if he were in the presence of God Himself.
But Merton was also a writer. As V. S. Naipaul said to the young Paul Theroux, (Theroux had not yet published anything), "But Paul, you are a writer, that is how you can endure the world." So Merton, despite living in a silent community reached out to the wider world through his books.
While still at Columbia, Merton purchased,
The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy. Knight describes Merton's reaction upon discovering that the book contains the "Nihil Obstat."
Merton, himself, was shocked when he first encountered the small print saying,
"Nihil Obstat...Imprimatur" in one of his early coveted readings --
Etienne Gilson's "The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy," which he bought
while still at Columbia. "Nothing hinders...let it be printed" --
the official go-ahead from the Vatican.
"The feeling of disgust and deception struck me like a
knife in the pit of my stomach," he wrote of his shock when he opened the book
on the train taking him home to Douglaston. "I felt as if I had been cheated...
I was tempted to throw the thing out the window."
But instead of giving in to his horror of censorship, he actually read the book,
and Gilson became one of his mentors, along with Mark Van Doren, the poet
William Blake, his Columbia professor friend Dan Walsh, and the
French writer Jacques Maritain.
From this book, discovers a new way of encountering God-one not necessarily shared by his friends.
"I discovered an entirely new concept of God," he said,
"expressed in the word 'Aseitas'...that God exists a se, of and
by reason of Himself...that God is Being Itself..."
It was a philosophical concept that Merton felt deeply;
His friend, Rice says in contrast:
for me, it is one more philosophical concept connected with
the idea of God that my own mind cannot connect with, cannot comprehend,
no matter how hard I try. I don't seem to have much control over this;
my mind keeps telling me that we're on our own.
The head of the order, the Abbot-General, Dom Gabriel Sortais and Merton found themselves completely at odds with one another. Sortais refused to allow a book that Merton had written about Teilhard de Chardin to be published. Merton writes:
"The decision means little to me one way or the other, and I can accept it without difficulty. Less easily the stuffy authoritarianism of Dom Gabriel, who cannot help being an autocrat, even while multiplying protestations of love. I rebel against being treated as a 'property,' as an 'instrument' and as a 'thing' by the Superiors of this Order. He definitely insists that I think as he thinks, for to think with him is to 'think with the Church.' To many this would seem quite obvious. Is it not the formula they follow in Moscow?"
Sortais assigns an official censor to Merton. After Merton's death, Knight goes to interview him. He says:
Father Paul had been chief censor for the Order in the United States
and was asked to pay special attention to Merton's voluminous writing.
We arrived too early and waited for about an hour while he took his
afternoon rest, which he visibly needed. A tall, frail man of 87,
with a wonderful smile, he said, yes, he had been the censor of Father Louis,
and quite reluctantly so. But he did use the word "censor";
the administrative directrice had said that Father Paul "critiqued"
Merton's writings. Father Paul seemed lightly apologetic about the whole matter.
"I told Dom Gabriel when he appointed me that the man I was
being asked to censor knew much more about the Cistercian Order than I do,"
he said to me. "But Dom Gabriel insisted; 'Vous avez du bon sens,
vous pouvez le faire.'"
From the way Father Paul described his conception of his functions to me,
he must have been more of a copy-editor than a censor. "I just corrected mistakes
in his texts," he said. "I never changed anything. Sometimes he was so busy
with writing and everything else that he would forget to attribute passages
to their author. He thanked me for this."
Merton's studies became increasingly influenced by Zen Buddhism. It was on a trip to a Zen Buddhist retreat in Thailand just after he had met the Dalai Lama that Merton was killed in a freak accident in his hotel room.
There is some movement in the Roman Catholic church to discredit some of Merton's work because of the Zen Buddhist influence. His friend, Rice speaks of this:
"Merton saw other religions and other denominations as travellers
on the same road. He was a student for years of Judaism and non-Christian religions.
He went deeply into Hinduism and Buddhism. The monastery (Gethsemani)
did not appreciate that he wrote so much about non-Christian religions.
Christians, then and today, see non-Christians as potential targets
for conversion, souls to be captured and turned into good Christians.
Merton didn't see it like that. His writings on Hinduism, Buddhism,
Confucianism, and later, Islam, are significant because of his belief
that all of them are searching, as he was, for the ultimate truth."
Yesterday's Psalm response at my church was something like, "Give thanks to God for God has given us great things-music and laughter." I know this isn't exactly right, but it is close.
When Merton died, his obituary was on the front page of the
New York Times along with the obituary for the Protestan theologian, Karl Barth, who had died in his sleep at the age of 82. Merton had written of Barth in his book,
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.
He wrote:
"Karl Barth had a dream about Mozart,"
Merton said. In the dream, Barth had been appointed to examine Mozart on his
theology, and he was trying to make things easy for him.
But Mozart did not answer. Merton felt that Barth's dream was about
Barth's salvation, and that Barth felt he would be saved more by the Mozart
in himself than by theology. "Each day, for years," Merton wrote,
"Barth played Mozart every morning before going to work on his dogma,
unconsciously seeking to awaken, perhaps, the hidden sophianic Mozart
in himself, the central wisdom that comes with the divine and cosmic music
and is saved by love...
"Fear not, Karl Barth," Merton continued. "Trust in the divine mercy...
Your books and mine matter less than we might think!
There is in us a Mozart who will be our salvation."
Perhaps, that Mozart in us who will be our salvation is what connects our ragged humanity to the Name.
The entire essay by Jim Knight can be read here:
http://www.therealmerton.com/default.html
It is well worth reading and somehow I feel there is a close connection with our discussion.
Joe
