Human beings do not know who they are.

That is why religion is necessary.

Richard DeMartino

A monk asks  Master  Pai-Chang, “Who is the Buddha?” Pai- Chang  answers, “Who are you?”

Know Thyself

Inscription on the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.

“What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?”

Thomas Merton

Oscar Wilde once said, “Be yourself.  Everyone else is taken.”  Nice quip, but there is a serious problem here.  We are creatures who have a deep drive and need to “know” what is real.  When we gaze at the world, says Aristotle, we are filled with wonder; and this wonder is the beginning of philosophy (and one could also add science).  At the first level of wonder we might ask, what is a human being?  An interesting exercise of a kind of curiosity that is natural to us but ultimately not really satisfying because there is another question lurking in our wonder, much more pressing:  who am I? and who is this self asking this question?

In that very same movement of inquiry we run into a most serious and intractable dilemma.  And here we need to recap a summary of the Zen analysis by Richard DeMartino:  

We are locked in an all-pervasive subject-object mode of consciousness, a radical dualism that always keeps us “apart from” or “outside of” all that we are aware of.    “That of which I am aware of” is always an object to me as subject, “the one who is aware.”  Within this dualistic matrix we can never know something from the “inside” as it were; our knowledge is always that of an “outsider.”  This is the first level of our sense of our selfhood, but it is as a “stranger” in this world so to speak.   An infant emerging into full consciousness is immediately making distinctions in establishing an awareness of his/hers selfhood:  I am not food; I am not the warm hand touching me; I am not the dog; I am not the blanket, I am not you….etc.  In other words, the most fundamental dualism is “I – not-I” where “not-I” encompasses the whole world “out there.”  So our first sense of “self-knowledge” is born from this pervasive fundamental dualism in a movement of discrimination and distinction.  Our “I” is in fact the very act of separating ourselves from the world, and then our knowledge of the world is only as an object “out there.” Subject, the ego-I,  and object, the not-I,  are locked together but precisely as subject-object.  And this is the foundational element of our modern tendency to make almost everything in our view into a commodity.

But this dualism is only the beginning of the problem.  We are unique creatures—we are also aware of the fact that we are aware….conscious of being conscious….in other words self-consciousness…..so, not just consciousness of the world we interact with, but now consciousness of that very fact itself.  This is what is ordinarily termed as our ego-self which we call “my self.” So, to be a self-aware “I” requires facing not only the world as “object,” but also that which I call “my self.”   This dualism creates a self-estrangement ; it creates an inherent dichotomy where the ego is rent by a double cleavage, split both within itself and from the world.  What Zen is all about is the healing of this split—but not by “improving” the ego-self, “upgrading” its vision, or rehabbing it into a “kinder, gentler ego”…..  In Zen, this dualistic sense of identity dissolves (some would say shatters) and in the same dynamic what is actualized is my awakening to what DeMartino calls the True Self….otherwise known as the selfless-Self, or the no-self, where the immoveable obstacle that the fractured “I” is, gets overcome and the person now realizes a state that is prior to the subject-object split(what Zen calls your “original face”).  What is important and critical here is that the ego-self cannot accomplish this no matter what it does or thinks—all this is trapped in dualism; and even as the ego-self tries to cancel or overcome a dualism standing in its way, so to speak, it simply creates another dualism.  A feeling, an idea, a notion of nondualism, a desire to simply “cancel” dualism within oneself only manifests more of the dualistic consciousness through another “object” for your ego subject.  There are many consequences of this fundamental dualism and self-estrangement.  Because the mind cannot directly perceive its own “essential emptiness,” its True Self, the no-self, it mistakenly creates and clings to a “self,” which is its object, its “self-image” if you will.  From the Zen Buddhist standpoint this begins the cycle of desire.   To protect and validate this artificial self, the mind generates a constant stream of needs and wants that it feels must be gratified, including the need for a “perfect” community, a “comfort zone” for the ego-self, etc.    Modern advertising is enabled and powered by this dynamic.   Here begins the First Noble Truth of Buddhism, the root of suffering, “dukkha,” which arises from the endless search to satisfy these desires.  We crave to fill the void of our perceived separation: power, wealth, sex….and the list goes on and on!  But if we get “religious”or “spiritual,” the ego-self can make a heroic effort at “managing” this dynamic but the deep down “dukkha” grinds on: fear, insecurity, anxiety, a need for approval, a need to be “somebody,” a pervasive sense of dissatisfaction, frenetic activity and busyness to keep oneself distracted, taking up various causes in order to create some meaning for one’s life, etc.   The ego-self, no matter how it dresses itself or what language it uses, cannot escape this “dukkha” through its own self efforts.  Here is an insightful quote from Merton, who though not a Buddhist, understood this very well:

“As long as this ‘brokenness’ of existence continues, there is no way out of the inner contradictions that it imposes upon us. If a man has a broken leg and continues to try to walk on it, he cannot help suffering. If desire itself is a kind of fracture, every movement of desire inevitably results in pain. But even the desire to end the pain of desire is a movement, and therefore causes pain. The desire to remain immobile is a movement. The desire to escape is a movement. The desire for Nirvana is a movement. The desire for extinction is a movement. Yet there is no way for us to be still by ‘imposing stillness’ on the desires. In a word, desire cannot stop itself from desiring, and it must continue to move and hence to cause pain even when it seeks liberation from itself and desires its own extinction.”  

As mentioned before, in Zen this absolute dualistic sense of identity dissolves and what is actualized is an awakening to my True Self, the selfless-self, the no-self. The ego-I has to die and in that same movement the True Self emerges as a supra nondualism, a pure awareness, a pure subjectivity with no “object”…..also it itself is not an “object” in any sense to any “subject.”  It is not a “something” that can be observed, admired, tinkered with….that’s why Zen Buddhism calls it a “nothingness,” no-mind, no-self.  And this is very important:  it is characterized by what DeMartino calls a supra nondualism.  Now consider all kinds of ordinary dualisms of the ego-self’s ordinary experience: like (suffering, joy), (existence, nonexistence…or more commonly known as life, death), (I-you), (samsara,nirvana), and how about this one (dualism, nondualism).  The ego-self is trapped in a dualistic quandary, and there is no manner of exit from this at the level of the ego-self….unless the ego-self dies, and dare I say it this way, and is “resurrected” as the True Self.   This self-less Self is an unspeakably marvelous awareness that leaves an awakener with tears of joy or exclamation of profound liberation or gasp of sudden realization.  What is remarkable beyond any conception and utterly paradoxical, this supra nondualism of the no-self encompasses all the dualisms of the ego-self….nothing is lost.  In other words “I” am still “I,” the True Self and the ego self are the same, and “you” are still “you”; but now at the same time “I” am also “you” and “you” are “me.”  “Life” and “death” are still life and death, but now death is found in life and life is found in death.  And recall that famous Zen saying:  Before enlightenment mountains are mountains, rivers are rivers.  During enlightenment mountains are no longer mountains and rivers are no longer rivers.  After enlightenment mountains are once more mountains and rivers are once more rivers.  A Zen Master is asked what is enlightenment; he answers, “When hungry, you eat; when thirsty, you drink.”  Then you wash your bowl.  The most profound spirituality unfolds in the everyday world with its ordinary dualisms but now the True Self is aware of it all with an all-encompassing supra nondualism where the most fundamental Zen Buddhist equation becomes: samsara = nirvana, nirvana=samsara

There is this remarkable video clip from the documentary Amongst White Clouds, a documentary about Zen and Taoist hermits in China in recent years.  The film begins slowly with a young hermit talking, and the subtle but astonished look  in his eyes indicates that he is talking about his own awakening.  He is amazed that  suffering and joy are “the same”!  He has awakened to a supra nondualistic consciousness which encompasses now his  awareness of ordinary, everyday dualistic experiences, and so he now lives in prajna-wisdom.  Here is a link to the whole move, but what I am referring to is primarily the first 5 minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pH2ozq65yHQ

And to conclude the Zen portion of this reflection here is a truly insightful explication by DeMartino of that iconic meeting between Bodhidharma, the First Patriarch of Zen, and Huiko, who eventually becomes the Second Patriarch:

“Venturing to interpret this account—very likely legendary—in what may be considered its symbolic significance for an understanding of Zen Buddhism, one first notes that an unsettled and distraught ego moves toward the teacher. The Zen master waits, as it were, for a questing ego to come to him. Even then he is apt not to accord direct recognition. On the surface his initial response sometimes appears to be slighting or discouraging. This seeming inattentiveness, or even rejection, is, however, but a mode of probing the seriousness of the quest. When the master has been convinced of the ultimacy of that seriousness, open acknowledgment and reception are immediately forthcoming. It is, indeed, just the all-compelling and unrelenting existential plight leading him to approach and to keep returning to Bodhidharma, to expose himself to a snow storm, and to cut off his own arm that establishes Hui-k’o symbolically as the first Zen ‘student.’ Perturbed and distressed in his inner contradiction, unrelieved by classical learning, Hui-k’o goes to Bodhidharma in search of alleviation and resolution, and is ready, in that pursuit, to stake his total being. Whatever the historicity of this incident, it is precisely this root-fundamental quest born of the inherent human predicament that constitutes, when brought before a Zen teacher, the existential beginning of Zen Buddhism. Without it, although one sit in crossed-legged meditation for decades at innumerable Zen temples, engaging in countless interviews with a myriad of Zen masters, one remains, notwithstanding, a student of Zen in name alone. For Zen Buddhism, finally, neither is in itself nor does it offer any objective, substantive content to be studied as such psychologically, religiously, philosophically, historically, sociologically, or culturally. The only valid component of Zen Buddhism is one’s own concrete life and existence, its basic contradiction and incompleteness, and, in distinction to the mere longing, the actual quest for reconciliation and fulfillment. If what goes under the designation of Zen Buddhism does not, in fact, deal with and undertake to resolve the intrinsic existential plight of the ego in ego consciousness, despite any claims it may make to ‘orthodoxy’ it is no longer authentic Zen Buddhism. Accepted as a genuine Zen student, Hui-k’o then inquired after the truth. Bodhidharma declared it was not to be found outside of oneself. Hui-k’o, nevertheless, bared his plaint. His heart-mind was not at peace, and he implored the master to pacify it. Here is further confirmation that Hui-k’o’s impelling vexation stemmed from his inner contradiction. The Chinese term, hsin, rendered as heart-mind, can mean heart or mind, but is more than either alone. The Greek, psyche, or the German, Geist, probably approach it more closely. In the terminology of this presentation, it may be taken to be the ego as subject. The ego as subject, in its situation of conditioned subjectivity, plagued by disquietude and unrest, pleads for pacification. Bodhidharma, in anticipation, had already begun his guidance and instruction in declaring that a resolution could not be gained from the outside. Not yet comprehending, and, perhaps, out of felt helplessness, or even desperation, Hui-k’o persisted and presented his plight, requesting Bodhidharma to alleviate it. What was Bodhidharma’s response? Did he delve into Hui-k’o’s past—his personal history, parents, early childhood, when he first began to sense the disturbance, the cause, symptoms, and attending circumstances? Did he explore Hui-k’o’s present—his occupation, marital status, dreams, likes, and interests? Bodhidharma’s reply was: ‘Bring forth your heart-mind and I shall pacify it for you.’  

Eschewing all the particularities of Hui-k’o’s life, past or present, Bodhidharma plunged immediately and directly into the living core of the human predicament itself. The ego, caught in the clutches of its own intrinsic contradiction and split, which it can neither resolve nor endure, is challenged to produce not anything it may feel to be its problem, but itself as apparent sufferer of the problem. Bring forth the ego-subject that is troubled! Bodhidharma, and Zen Buddhism after him, realizes that finally and fundamentally it is not that the ego has a problem, but that the ego is the problem. Show me who it is who is disturbed and you shall be pacified. Beginning thus with Bodhidharma and continuing ever thereafter, the basic, unveering approach of Zen Buddhism, whatever the special form or mode of its methodology . . . has been just such a straightforward, concrete assault upon the contradictory dualistic subject-object structure of the ego in ego-consciousness. The sole and exclusive aim has remained throughout to overcome the divisive inner and outer cleavage separating and removing the ego from itself—and its world—in order that it may fully be and truly know who and what it is.”

Now the question arises, what does all of this hold for the Christian contemplative path, monastic or otherwise?  Here is Yamada Roshi speaking to Jesuit Thomas Hand:  “There are two types of Zen practice.  The first is really strict Buddhist Zen.  You have all the statues and everything else like that; you follow all the Buddhist teaching and everything.  And then there is just pure Zen.  You will follow that, and that will make you a better Catholic.”  The best way to proceed in this manner is to follow the person who has gone the furthest in this direction: Thomas Merton.  We can observe Merton’s foundational appropriation of Zen, and perhaps we can build on that….but we will not do the “easy thing” which Merton also did not do….say that the languages of both paths are equivalent or they are totally incompatible.  Merton learned much from Zen; he did not become a Zen Buddhist.

Let us begin in a personal way…with the very person of  Thomas Merton.  In 1954 he writes a startling letter to his Abbot, James Fox:

“I am beginning to face some facts about myself. Yes, need for more of a life of prayer, greater fidelity, greater sincerity and simplicity in doing what God wants of me. Easy to say all that. It depends on getting rid of something very deep and very fundamental in myself. . . Continual, uninterrupted resentment. I resent and even hate Gethsemani. I fight against the place constantly. I do not openly allow myself—not consciously—to sin in this regard. But I am in the habit of letting my resentment find every possible outlet and it is such a habit. . . . I am not kidding about how deep it is. It is DEEP.” (Gethsemani Abbey archives, Passion Sunday, 1954).  

Here is a very well-educated man of great spiritual sensitivity, who has been living as a traditional Trappist monk now for 13 years, ordained in 1949, then a Master of Scholastics, guiding the simply professed who are training for ordination; and you can be sure he has full command of traditional Christian monastic spirituality.  But it’s also obvious that he himself is in a real spiritual struggle, and the traditional language and approach are not able to help him.  One is tempted to say that here Merton is Huiko but alas Abbot Fox is not Bodhidharma! There’s a lot more to his problems at this point, but we won’t get into that.  His abbot suggested that he meet with a psychotherapist, and that turned out to be a disaster.  He had two sessions: in the first one the psychotherapist confronted Merton with blunt criticisms, accusing him of megalomania, narcissism, and labeling his desire to live as a hermit as pathological. Hard to believe but Merton had a second session and brought along his abbot.  In the presence of Merton’s superior, the psychotherapist repeated his critiques, reportedly causing Merton to fly into a fury and weep with rage. 

By 1956 he takes up the study of Zen.  Later he asks his publisher to send him every book D. T. Suzuki ever wrote!  His view of the contemplative path undergoes a transformation—and it was not only Zen but also the Sufis that had a big hand in this.  In 1958 he has that famous experience in Louisville (there is a plaque there now!), “at the corner of Fourth and Walnut,” which he describes in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.  Here is just the beginning of his account:

“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 these 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. . . .
This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . .”

If you know something of Zen, this account feels and sounds like a kind of kensho experience, the first temporary glimpse of a glimmer of one’s real nature.  Obviously Merton delineates the experience in Christian terms (also Sufi elements here…) but the Zen influence is very much there.  It is also very evident in his writings from this period, especially in the ones on Christian contemplative spirituality—books like The Inner Experience and New Seeds of Contemplation and various articles.  If there were no Zen in these works, they would be very different and seriously truncated.  And then of course there is his masterpiece of expounding a Christian approach to Zen and Buddhism:  Zen and the Birds of Appetite.  But if you want to see the full impact of Zen on Merton’s own life, not just his ideas, you need to read his little essay, “Day of a Stranger.”  

https://hudsonreview.com/1967/07/day-of-a-stranger/

Written in 1967, about a year before his death, written at the request of some people in South America who asked him to describe his life now as a hermit, it reveals a whole new spiritual ambience for his monastic journey.  His Zen now is an intrinsic part of his being and so beyond all labels, even the label “Zen.”

In 9^th century China a new Zen monk asked Master Chao-Chou, “What is Chao-Chou?” (meaning, “What is your true nature?”).  The Master replied:

“East gate, west gate, south gate, north gate.” 

The Master played on the fact that “Chao-Chou” was also the name of the city where they lived. Like any typical walled city of that era, it had four main gates. By naming the gates, he suggested that his “way” or True Self is not a hidden secret. It is as open and accessible as a city that you can enter from any direction.  Total openness. Instead of giving a complex philosophical answer, he pointed to the immediate, physical world around him, teaching the monk to find truth “here and now”.  The “gates” represent an invitation to enter the world of Zen directly rather than getting stuck in theories or definitions. 

It is no wonder that in his  last years Merton often felt closer to people like Chao-Chou than to many other Christian monks.

Merton knew Richard DeMartino and greatly valued his explication of Zen.  This (and a few other contributions) enabled him to engage in a profound reinterpretation of the myth of Original Sin as it impacts Christian spirituality.  And reinterpreting it through the lens of identity.  He manages to keep the heart of the Catholic doctrine intact but now primarily as a psychological and spiritual “distortion of reality” rather than just a legalistic or inherited stain of guilt. To Merton, it is the fundamental “blindness” that leads humans to live from a false self—an illusory identity centered on selfish desires, fear, and pride—instead of their true self, which is the image of God within them.  Merton:

“The story of the Fall tells us in mythical language that “original sin” is not simply a stigma arbitrarily making good pleasures seem guilty, but a basic inauthenticity, a kind of predisposition to bad faith in our understanding of ourselves and of the world. It implies a determined willfulness in trying to make things be other than they are in order that we may be able to make them subserve, at any moment, to our individual desire for pleasure or for power. But since things do not obey our arbitrary impulsions, and since we cannot make the world correspond to and confirm the image of it dictated by our needs and illusions, our willfulness is inseparable from error and from suffering. Hence, Buddhism says, deluded life itself is in a state of Dukkha,….” 

Both Christianity and Buddhism agree that the root of man’s problems is that his consciousness is all fouled up and he does not apprehend reality as it fully and really is; that the moment he looks at something, he begins to interpret it in ways that are prejudiced and predetermined to fit a certain wrong picture of the world, in which he exists as an individual ego in the center of things. This is called by Buddhism avidya, or ignorance . … This is the source of all our problems.”  

Merton’s shifted his view from a purely theological struggle between “good” and “bad” selves toward a more radical, ontological understanding of reality. Using Zen freely and fully, Merton says:  “I was born with a mask.”  Merton used the metaphor of a mask to describe the “False Self”—the artificial identity we construct based on our ego.   He stopped seeing the “false self” as just a collection of sins and began seeing it as a “provisional self-construction”—a useful tool for daily life that becomes spiritually toxic when we think it’s our ultimate reality. Due to Original Sin we are born in a state where we are separated from our True Self (our identity in God) and instead identify with this “mask” or false persona. In his earlier Christian writings, the notion of a”true self” often sounded like a better, holier version of a person. Zen helped Merton see that the “true self” isn’t a “thing” you find or a prize you win; it is a state of emptiness (sunyata). He began to describe the true self as a “no-body.”   There is an abyss separating us from our own inner reality.  The spiritual journey, therefore, is not simply “following rules” and trying to be “better human beings,” but to “shatter the mask,” dissolve the mask,” undergo a real transformation,” whatever terms you choose, what we seek is to awaken to our True Self hidden in the love and mercy of God.

Here Merton goes beyond Zen, but even in this he is greatly helped by Zen.  Merton’s earlier view was deeply dualistic: I – God, “Me” here and “God” there.   (Digression:  This is not to disparage common Christian/Catholic piety where a person simply “talks to God”—after all it is Scriptural!  But here’s the main thing—remember that the True Self is a supra nondualism, which encompasses and in which can be found all the dualisms of ordinary consciousness…mountains are once mountains…”I” am once more “I”….and “God” is once more “God”—and a person of profound realization might once more utter his/her simple prayers just like a Zen Master would still bow to a Buddha representation….)  Zen pushed him toward the supra nondualism of the True Self, where the distinction between the observer and the observed disappears. He realized that the true self isn’t just “radically one with God,” but is actually God’s own life acting through the person. Here he is reflecting with his “Zen eyes” on the famous Burning Bush scene in the Book of Exodus: “Is the fire other than the Bush? More than the Bush? Or is the fire more the Bush than the Bush itself?”.  If someone should ask you, who/what is God, you should reply, who are you?!

  Augustine, who is not known as a voice of the apophatic tradition, said this in one of his writings:

“We are talking about God. What wonder is it that you do not understand? If you do understand, then it is not God.”

The Absolute Mystery of God marks our True Self also.  In a sense, awakening to our True Self is getting lost in the unspeakable Divine Mystery.  The secret of my true identity is hidden in the Absolute Mystery of God, the All-Merciful One, the All-Compassionate One, the All-Loving One.  If I find Him, I will find myself; and if I find my True Self, I will find Him.   But really the only one who can teach me and lead me to find God is God Himself, alone.

This will be part 1 of a two-part reflection.  Here we will reflect on the notion and the reality of Zen.  Part 2 will be titled, “Who am I?”, “Who is God?”—partially an application of Zen to two very big questions.

About ten years ago, in November of 2016 to be precise, I posted a reflection on the “problems of Zen.”  I dealt with the moral/ethical problems afflicting Zen Buddhism in the U.S. and Japan….as was also the case with so many other religious groups.  I also mentioned in passing the diminishment of Zen Buddhism in Japan—certainly still a very strong cultural and aesthetic presence in Japanese life but as a vibrant religious reality, only  a shadow of its former self.  In the U.S. it had too often become another activity or commodity for the modern consumer.  It was often reduced to “feel good” and “be more efficient” tools.   (Here’s a description of Zen from AI:  “In a lifestyle context, ‘Zen’ remains highly popular globally as a symbol of mindfulness, simplicity, and intimacy with one’s true nature. It is increasingly viewed as a practical tool for finding ‘inner peace’ in a high-stress, digital world.)  And finally I considered the scholarly academic community that was exploring Zen Buddhism, demythologizing and deconstructing the linguistic “scaffolding” of Zen and reducing it to its superficial structures.  (And there’s good money to be made in doing that!)  Now all of this is ok to be aware of, but I think I need to revisit the “land of Zen” and not neglect but explore a bit its real vitality, its Importance, albeit much neglected these days…and really ponder “the heart of the matter,” the real thing that is called Zen,  and to ponder its relevance even for us on the Christian contemplative path. 

Back then I used a long quote from one of Merton’s last written works, Zen and the Birds of Appetite, a key insightful text and a must-read for anyone wanting to get some sense of what real Zen is all about.  Merton made a sharp controversial claim: he delineated a distinction between Zen Buddhism and Zen.  This is a really big no-no for the academic scholars of Zen Buddhism.  In a sense these people are claiming authority through their methodology to determine “what is Zen” by explaining the phenomenon of Zen Buddhism.  The problem of interpretive authority is present in all religious traditions, but that’s a topic for another time.

Certainly Zen’s natural home is in Buddhism, and so we have a history and culture of Zen Buddhism (which can be scientifically and rationally investigated).  But Merton emphatically points out that whatever this “thing” we  label as Zen is, it is not reducible to, not explainable by, not encompassed by any of the cultural and religious structures and texts and institutions that carry the label of “Zen Buddhism”:  the monasteries and monks, the koans, the sutras, the roshis, the robes and bowing, even zazen itself, etc., etc.  Whatever Zen is it transcends all that and, as Merton suggests, can live and manifest itself in a completely different context.  The true Zen Buddhist knows this very well, and this is illustrated in a number of sayings.  One of the greatest Japanese Zen Masters, Dogen, said, “Whoever says that Zen is a sect/school of Buddhism is a devil”—in other words an agent of delusion!  An interesting analogical situation can be found in the classical Christian Desert Fathers where some of them discover the essence of “desert spirituality,” in persons without any “desert credentials.”  Here is a small piece of Merton’s  larger quote:

“To define Zen in terms of a religious system or structure is in fact to destroy it–or rather to miss it completely, for what cannot be ‘constructed’ cannot be destroyed either. Zen is not something which is grasped by being set within distinct limits or given a characteristic outline or easily recognizable features so that, when we see these distinct and particular forms, we say: ‘There it is!’ Zen is not understood by being set apart in its own category, separated from everything else: ‘It is this and not that.’…. We see from this that Zen is outside all particular structures and distinct forms, and that it is neither opposed to them nor not-opposed to them. It neither denies them nor affirms them, loves them nor hates them, rejects them nor desires them. Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, trans-formed consciousness. It is therefore in a sense ‘void.’ But it can shine through this or that system, religious or irreligious, just as light can shine through glass that is blue, or green, or red, or yellow. If Zen has any preference it is for glass that is plain, has no color, and is ‘just glass.’”

Lets fast forward now about 40 years.  Richard DeMartino.  He was a little-known professor of religion at Temple University and a true and profound student of Zen.  As a young man he himself was a close student and associate of D.T.  Suzuki, and later he wrote very little but was well-known and influential among the serious students of Zen including Merton but not at all in the realm of pop zen.  

DeMartino was deeply critical of the “business of Zen,” how it had been institutionalized in modern society and marketed.  He observed  that Zen had become a “thing” or a career path where people could make a living. It was a consumerist mindfulness: He argued that modern versions often package Zen as a “way to conduct yourself” or a set of behavioral guidelines rather than a radical transformation of the self.  The rituals of Zen have often replaced its actual essence: resolving the fundamental problem of human existence.

There is a well-known statement of his that in many ways hints at what Merton had said much earlier:

“The problem with Zen is that there is such a word.”

When I first saw this statement I immediately thought of this old Sufi saying:

 “Today, Sufism is a name without a reality, whereas before it was a reality without a name.”

DeMartino’s little statement is deep and rich in implications, and it probably would take a book to explicate all its nuances.  Here we will consult one of his  own students, Joe McSorley, to at least point us in the right direction:

“….I must address what Zen appears to be today and some of its pitfalls. What Dr DeMartino was trying to express in the above quote is that once you have a concept of something called Zen you are already lost. Today Zen has become a ‘thing’, a way to conduct yourself, a series of rituals and even a vocation at which you can make a living. This was all too apparent when I was in Japan recently and saw the disdain many locals had towards the business of Zen. I was quite shocked by it all. Now Zen is considered to be the practice of zazen, the koan or mindfulness….  I think Zen has become technique oriented instead of awakening oriented. Instead of delving into the heart of the matter, today’s Zen teaches technique, mainly meditation/zazen. Why has this become the main focus of Zen? Here I think it is good to look at two of the most essential stories of Buddhism. In the founding story of Buddhism, Siddhartha finds that a life of hedonism and a life of asceticism both fail at liberation from suffering. The story goes that he was so extreme in his asceticism that he lived on one grain of rice a day. He realized that this austere life was going to kill him so he gave it up. Upon reaching this extreme point, he vowed to sit under the Bodhi tree and not move till the problem was solved. The story does not say that he sat in meditation under the tree but that he just sat. He had meditated for years in the forest: what was different about what he was doing now? This is my question to practitioners of ‘Zen’. What is fundamentally different in his sitting under the tree as opposed to his years of practice in the forest?

“The second story is that of Dazu Huike approaching Bodhidharma. This is essentially the beginning of Zen and therefore most germane. After standing for days outside of Bodhi’s cave, he is finally approached by Bodhi. Bodhi asks, ‘Why are you here?’ and Huike replies, ‘My heart-mind is not at ease’. Bodhi replies, ‘The way is long and difficult’ and with that Huike takes out his sword and cuts off his arm thus proving his strong intentions and desperation. Bodhi accepts this and says, ‘What is wrong?’ And Huike replies, ‘My heart-mind is not at ease’ and Bodhi declares, ‘Hand it to me that I may pacify it!’ With that, Huike is awakened and liberated from his suffering. Now for the man to whom nine years of supposed wall-gazing meditation is the way, why doesn’t he tell Huike to meditate? All of Zen today is based on this idea of meditation, yet Bodhi himself didn’t tell Huike to meditate: how can this be? What actually happened at this encounter? This is the crux of Zen….  There is a spiritual materialism that exists in Zen and has for centuries. Monks competing on who was more ardent and tearing extra holes in their clothes to show their poverty. There is as much attachment to the robes and bald heads as any other person has to their persona. By cutting your hair and wearing robes you may be trading one form of attachment for another.

“I have encountered masters who will not in any way engage in a deep inquiry into what they teach. It is more about believing what they tell you or following their instructions. It is not about being driven deeper and deeper to the root of the problem. I have seen students expelled from Zen lectures because they dared to sincerely challenge the teacher in their quest for truth.  So there is this institution called Zen now that has its own culture, practices and awards, and that is not what I am in the least bit interested in. When I came to Zen decades ago, I had no idea what it was. I had a poison arrow deep in my being and needed it out. I was most fortunate to find a teacher who immediately and profoundly addressed the issue and never taught me ‘Zen.’”

In Christian monasticism St. Benedict says that a person “knocking on the door” of monasticism should be “tested” to see if he/she is “truly seeking God.”  No matter what words the aspirant uses, at that point there should begin a profound journey of discovery and awakening.  I emphasize the word “should.”  No matter what the aspirant says or truly sincerely believes, most likely the real message underlying his words is, “I have a problem, I am not happy (or some variant like I am deeply dissatisfied with life, I am filled with anxiety and insecurity, I need an identity, I want others to think well of me, etc., etc.), and so I need a new persona and I think that God will fill that need of mine.”  And as Merton has pointed out, too often our monasticism has provided a new persona, with new lingo thrown in, instead of a journey of discovery and awakening.  The same difficulty appears very often in Zen Buddhism also!  But now imagine an aspirant knocking on the door of a real Zen place.  And imagine the aspirant saying the same thing to a real Zen Master.  He/she would likely say something like  “Zen has no personas to sell or give.  And as for you, you do not have a problem, you ARE the problem.”  Ouch!  St. Benedict is a bit more gentle.  Zen aims sharply for the heart of the matter from the very first step, and here compassion does take on many forms that we might not recognize.

For many people, Zen is associated with some method, some practice, an awareness, a study, a mental tool of sorts, even a way of life.  No need to exclude any of these from Zen—they can be a critical part of one’s journey to awakening– as long as one has some clarity about what Zen is really all about.  What are you truly seeking? What is Zen after all?  Here Merton will help us, using some not so obvious symbolism:

“Where there is carrion lying, meat-eating birds circle and descend. Life and death are two. The living attack the dead, to their own profit. The dead lose nothing by it. They gain too, by being disposed of. Or they seem so, if you must think in terms of gain and loss. Do you then approach the study of Zen with the idea that there is something to be gained by it? This question is not intended as an implicit accusation. But it is, nevertheless, a serious question. Where there is a lot of fuss about “spirituality,” “enlightenment” or just “turning on,” it is often because there are buzzards hovering around the corpse. This hovering, this circling, this descending, this celebration of victory, are not what is meant by the Study of Zen — even though they may be a highly useful exercise in other contexts. And they enrich the birds of appetite.  The birds may come and circle for a while in the place where it is thought to be. But they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the ‘nothing,’ the ‘no-body’ that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey.”

Granted this is a bit enigmatic, but it does point us in the right direction.  As a way of getting to the heart of Zen, let us now ponder some historical/legendary/mythic moments in the story of Zen as it appears in its natural home and becomes Zen Buddhism:

1. When he was finally enlightened, Sakyamuni, the Buddha, would occasionally offer a kind of sermon or discourse.  One time he said nothing to the little gathering, only held up a white flower and looked at it.  Everyone was confused, except Mahakashyapa, one of his first disciples.  Mahakashyapa began to smile; he got it while the rest were clueless.  The Buddha then spoke up and proclaimed Mahakashyapa as his Dharma heir, and some legends have it that he was the First Patriarch of Chan/Zen.

Comment:  That flower was the first Zen koan; Mahakashyapa’s smile was the second Zen koan.  Ponder these.  If you try to “solve” them, “figure them out,” analyze the situation, you will be totally lost.  The heart of Zen, what it’s all about, is always there, right in front of you.  There is nothing secret here, nothng hidden, nothing needing some special knowledge.  For centuries this truth will be repeated in countless Chan/Zen stories, sayings.

2. Bodhidharma, an Indian Buddhist monk, came to China a few centuries after Sakyamuni’s life.  Buddhism had already arrived at China and was not all that popular yet.  It is said that Bodhidharma was a follower of Mahakashyapa’s line—in other words, he “studied and practiced” what eventually came to be called Chan and when it got to Japan it was called Zen.  Bodhidharma was called upon to declare what his Buddhism was all about.  He produced this brief quatrain; and this became known as Zen Buddhism (or simply Chan in Chinese) and Bodhidharma came to be known as its First Patriarch of Chan:

A separate transmission outside the scriptures.

Not dependent upon words or letters.

Direct pointing at the human mind.

Seeing one’s nature and becoming Buddha.

Comment:  This  is where some academic people explode!  They say, “What do you mean, no scriptures, no words….Zen adherents have produced thousands of texts over the centuries, hundreds of thousands of words.”  And of course the scholars love to study all these writings and come up with all kinds of interesting things to say, and one can make a nice career in doing that.   But what they study is not Zen.  

3.  As Bodhidharma prepared to return to India(perhaps to die), he asked his four main disciples to express their understanding of the Dharma. 

Each disciple gave a different answer, and Bodhidharma responded by comparing their level of insight to a different part of his body: 

Daofu: He stated that the truth is neither bound by words nor entirely separate from them. Bodhidharma replied, “You have attained my skin”.

Nun Zongchi: She described the truth as a glimpse of the realm of the Buddha, which once seen, need not be seen again. Bodhidharma replied, “You have attained my flesh”.

Daoyu: He explained that the four elements are empty and the five aggregates do not exist, meaning there is nothing to grasp. Bodhidharma replied, “You have attained my bones”.

Huike, who was previously mentioned above by McSorley, stepped forward, bowed in silence, and returned to his place without saying a word. Bodhidharma declared, “You have attained my marrow”. 

Comment:  Huike became the Second Patriarch of Chan.

4. During the Tang Dynasty (around the 9^thcentury CE), which is sometimes called the “Golden Age of Zen,” there was a most peculiar and legendary Chan Master by the name of Qici (or Kaishi/Qieci…also known as Pu-tai).  He did not live in a monastery or as a hermit; he roamed the cities and the countryside of southern China as a mendicant monk.  He carried a large cloth sack over his shoulder, and from it he pulled out little gifts and food for the needy and children.  In later iconography he is depicted as a bald, portly man with a perpetual smile and exposed belly.  In modern day Chinese shops one can find little figurines of him with the label: “Laughing Buddha.”

In any case, Qici avoided all titles and had no disciples.  One day he met an “official” Chan Master who asked him, “What is the significance of Chan?”  Qici immediately plopped his sack down on the ground in silence.  Then the Zen Master asked him, “What is the actualization of Chan?”  At once Qici swung the sack over his shoulder and continued on his way.

5. Yamaoka Tesshu, as a young student of Zen in 19^th century Japan, visited one master after another with a certain futility.  He finally came to a master by the name of Dokuon.  Desiring to show his attainment and knowledge, he said, “The mind, Buddha, and sentient beings, after all,  do not exist.  The true nature of phenomena is emptiness.  There is no realization, no delusion, no sage,….”  Dokuon, who was smoking quietly, said nothing.  Suddenly he whacked Yamaoka with his bamboo pipe.   This made the youth quite angry.  “If nothing exists,” inquired Dokuon, “where does this anger come from.”

(in Zen Flesh, Zen Bones)

6. Modern day mondo (private meeting) with a Zen Master:

Actual questioner:  If you follow any way, you will never get there; and if you do not follow any way, you will not get there.  So I face a dilemma.

Zen Master: Let that dilemma be your way!

Ordinary human consciousness is characterized by a dualistic mode of awareness (here I will follow DeMartino’s explication).  In all our knowing and in all our awareness we are locked into a subject-object matrix.    There is the “knower” and there is the “known,” and these are two.    Everything we are aware of, everything we “know,” stands as an “object” apart from us, “outside” us.  In fact this is the beginning, the first level of our selfhood—the discrimination between “I” and all else which is “not-I.”  I—not-I is a fundamental dualism which encompasses many other dualisms which we will need to unpack a bit in part two.  But first lets get back to the problem of the self, the root problem of human existence.  We are not only aware of the world “out there,” but we also have an awareness of the fact “that we are aware.”  In other words, self-awareness– this is what we call our ego-self, seemingly  the person that we are.  But here is a most serious problem.  DeMartino:

“Man’s ordinary, reflective consciousness of himself—or his self-consciousness—is problematic in the Zen view because it is a dualistic subject-object (the knower-the known) mode of consciousness.  For ordinary human consciousness—whether of itself or whatever—is a mode of consciousness in which the subject or ‘that which is conscious’ ever stands outside of or apart from the object or ‘that of which it is conscious.’  In its reflective consciousness of itself, therefore, the ordinary ego-self can know itself only as an ‘object-known,’ but never as a ‘subject-knower.’  The ordinary self, consequently, does not—and can not—know itself completely or ‘truly.’”   The predicament of the human ego-I, its root problem, and its fundamental inner contradiction is that the ego-I is always both bound to and at the same time alienated from both itself and the world.  The paradox is that it is always the “outsider” in everything It faces, even its own self.  In a very real sense it is a “stranger” to its very self.  This has enormous implications for Christian contemplative spirituality and for much, much more.  We will explore all this and more in the next posting.  Suffice it to say that Zen shatters this dualistic consciousness; or, to put it more gently, it leads one to the resolution of this all-pervasive dualism through an awakening to the “self-less Self,” what DeMartino calls the True Self–which is an all-pervasive, awesome, perhaps best- designated as “supra nondualism”—about which much to say in part two.  The ego-I cannot “achieve” or “attain” or “realize” this through all its efforts because it is by nature dualistic, and so every effort will be awash with dualism.  All it will get you is a notion of nondualism, an idea in your head, a feeling….  In a manner of speaking that kind of self-consciousness has to die—what the Sufis call “fana” and Zen calls the “Great Death.”  This subject-object matrix where the “I” views itself and the world as separate objects, leading to inherent alienation and  what the Buddhists call “suffering,” “dukkha,” dissolves into a profound awakening where the fractured “I” is overcome to realize a state that is prior to the subject-object split.   Just a hint of the next discussion….but this is in ancient Christian terminology termed as a “return to Paradise” (where human beings lived in deep harmony with all within and with all without).   For now we will content ourselves with a marvelous description by D. T. Suzuki of what this awareness brings about:

“The Zen approach is to enter right into the object itself and see it as it were from the inside.  To know the flower is to become the flower, to be the flower, to bloom as the flower and to enjoy the sunlight as well as the rainfall.  When this is done, the flower speaks to me and I know all its secrets, all its joys, all its sufferings;  that is, all its life vibrating within itself.  Not only that: along with my ‘knowledge’ of the flower I know all the secrets of the universe, which includes all the secrets of my own Self, which has been eluding my pursuit all my life so far, because I divided myself into a duality, the pursuer and the pursued, the object and the shadow.  No wonder that I never succeeded in catching myself, and how exhausting this game was.  Now, however, by knowing the flower I know my Self.  That is, by losing myself in the flower I know my Self as well as the flower.”

And I shall conclude with a lovely line of poetry from one of China’s great poets during the Tang Dynasty, Li Po, or sometimes known as Li Bai:

“We sat together, the forest and I, merging into silence. Until only the forest remained.”

To be continued….

Continuing our Lenten reflection, let us begin with a few quotes:

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.….  We’re a superpower, and under President Trump we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower….  Under our new National Security Strategy, American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.” 

Stephen Miller (top White House advisor) in an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN, Jan. 5, 2026

“I say violence is necessary. Violence is a part of America’s culture. It is as American as cherry pie. Americans taught the black people to be violent. We will use that violence to rid ourselves of oppression if necessary.”

H. Rap Brown, Black Activist, 1967

“Being an American means reckoning with a history fraught with violence and injustice. Ignoring that reality in favor of mythology is not only wrong but also dangerous. The dark chapters of American history have just as much to teach us, if not more, than the glorious ones, and often the two are intertwined.” 

Ken Burns, historian and documentary maker, 2026

“No one is illegal on stolen land, and, yeah, it’s just really hard to know what to do and what to say right now, and I just, I feel really hopeful in this room and I feel like we just need to keep fighting and speaking up and protesting, and our voices really do matter and the people matter. And F ICE is all I want to say.”

Billie Eilish, at the Grammy Awards, 2026

“There have been periods of history in which episodes of terrible violence occurred but for which the word violence was never used…Violence is shrouded in justifying myths that lend it moral legitimacy, and these myths for the most part kept people from recognizing the violence for what it was. The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence we humans have ever committed.”

Gil Bailie, Catholic theologian

“The Park Service debuted the digital tool in step with other recent actions across the national park system complying with Executive Order 14253, ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.’ They include removing materials describing atrocities committed against Native Americans, dismantling exhibits highlighting the treatment of enslaved people, and deleting information on how climate change is negatively impacting ecosystems and landscapes.”

From SFGate, Feb. 11, 2026

It is not easy to think or speak about nonviolence in our culture or really in any other culture without at the same time seeming to sink into total irrelevance.  To some people “nonviolence” looks like a safe harbor for cowardice; to others it appears as a moral Disneyland….you can visit the “fantasy” at times, but it’s not life as we know it and you can’t live there; and to still others it is nothing more than a fatal passivity and abnegation of responsibility.   And truly history would seem to vindicate such opinions.  Too often these kinds of caricatures of true nonviolence are what is presented as an alternative to a violent response.  What Stephen Miller is articulating in the above quote has been the vision and practice of all great powers, from ancient times to now.  But violence, either in aggression or in response to aggression,  is pervasive in human culture at all levels—political, social, economic, relational, and, yes, even deeply personal.   So often violence is concealed and disguised as some form of a “good” both on a grand scale and also in our everyday personal life.   Whether the violence emerges from the established order (or better called, disorder), or whether it emerges as a response to this disorder/injustice from either a simple shout of “F…. you” out of frustration/anger toward  another human being or it goes all the way to a bloody revolution, it is all within a great untruth. The fact is we all live within this Great Lie and it influences all we do and all that affects us. To get some understanding of what this really means and then what true nonviolence is we will enlist the aid of Vaclav Havel.

Havel was a Czech playwright, brilliant intellectual, and a forceful dissident against the totalitarian communist governments of Eastern Europe in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s.  In 1978 he wrote an essay called “The Power of the Powerless,” and some have called it the most Important essay of the 20^th century.  Originally an underground publication, it became a manifesto for dissidents and resistance across the Soviet bloc and a foundational text for the Solidarity Movement in Poland.   In it he acutely analyzed and made manifest the real nature of their systemic oppression and how to go about dismantling it.  

From the internet:   “Havel argued that late-stage communist regimes weren’t traditional dictatorships held together by a single tyrant. Instead, they were ‘post-totalitarian’—sustained by a vast bureaucracy and an all-encompassing ideology that functioned like a ‘secularized religion’.  They were living within a Lie, and the system’s survival depended on everyone participating in its rituals, even if they didn’t believe in them. By performing these empty gestures, citizens became both victims and supporters of the system.”

Havel illustrates this with an example:  every morning a shopkeeper goes to his store and as he opens up he puts  up a sign:  Workers of the World Unite.  The grocer doesn’t believe the slogan to mean anything real, nor does he care or expect anyone else to believe it means anything; but he displays it diligently as a signal to officials that he is ‘beyond reproach’ so he will be left in peace to pursue his little business and avoid trouble with the state.  This example is Havel’s metaphor for how ordinary people sustain such a regime through small, seemingly insignificant acts of conformity.  In putting up the sign, he signals his willingness to comply with the regime’s rituals.  Every shopkeeper on the street does the same; they collectively create a world of appearances that sustains the regime.

Havel then explains that the system’s power doesn’t come from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to act as if it were true.  This is what Havel means by “living within a lie.”  But Havel continues the metaphor:  One day the shopkeeper decides to take down the sign, decides to stop putting up the sign.  It is an act of resistance, and by this act he “shatters the world of appearances.”   Now he is moving toward “Living in Truth.”  He stops voting in sham elections and starts saying what he actually thinks.  In effect the shopkeeper has become the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s fable, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”  Let us review the fable with help from the Internet:

“The plot follows an emperor who cares excessively about his appearance and expensive clothing. Two swindlers arrive in his city, posing as weavers. They claim to create a fabric so magnificent that it is invisible to anyone who is either unfit for their position or hopelessly stupid.  Fearing they will be seen as unfit or stupid, the Emperor’s ministers—and eventually the Emperor himself—pretend to see the non-existent cloth.  The swindlers dress the Emperor in the invisible garments. He marches through the city in a grand procession before his subjects.  The townspeople, also afraid of being judged, praise the clothes until a small child shouts out the truth: ‘But he hasn’t got anything on!’”

So the Lie, the façade,  is shattered by a child who is not shackled by social status or ego, and thus is able to speak the objective truth.

Havel goes on to explain that this single act is extremely dangerous to the state. If the system is built on a universal lie, even one person breaking that lie threatens the entire structure because it invites others to do the same. This “power of the powerless” is the idea that personal moral decisions can ultimately lead to political and social transformation.  This whole approach is very resonant with Gandhi’s teaching on the relationship of truth to nonviolence and personal and communal transformation.

I have borrowed Havel to help us understand our own situation, which is of course radically different in many external ways….but also disturbingly deeper and darker in its grip on our lives.  In the past I was often envious of the dissidents in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc…their problem, their “living within a lie,” appeared to be staring them in the face, quite clearly, or so it seemed at that time.  But now our problem is so pervasive, so dark yet so deeply intertwined with what we value, so subtle that it seems “natural,” and “normal.”  And it leads to a kind of deceptive “flourishing,” “success” with a poison pill in it….the “American dream” masking  a nightmare.  The essence of our problem is that the Great Lie within which we all live is not really something nameable so that we can “measure it” as it were and keep it “out there” and simply put it on the list of “problems to solve”…..simply elect a different political option and then we won’t be bothered…..but in our case THAT does not “take down the sign.”   

To name the Great Lie is to deceive ourselves that we see its limits, that we know what it is, how close it is to our hearts and lives and how it totally affects us; when we think we have named it, we are sinking ever deeper into its grip.   The Great Lie is not something that we can limit to politics or economics or sociology or law or personal relationships or even religion.  It surely involves all these but perhaps not in a way that is apparent to our now-crippled vision.  Both Havel and Gandhi….and Merton and a few others….can help us understand our situation, what is at stake, and “what must I do.”  And this Lent in these dark times all of these good folk would say with one voice:  “Take down your sign!”  Resist the Great Lie and begin living in the Truth.

Violence at all levels and falsehood at all levels is the language that the Great Lie speaks publicly and in our hearts.  Nonviolence at all levels is the language of resistance to the Great Lie.  Gandhi was a master at understanding this.  His primary focus was on Truth– deep, fundamental Truth.  Truth (Satya) and nonviolence (ahimsa) were for him two sides of the same coin.   For Gandhi, truth was not just telling the truth but the absolute, underlying reality of existence….Divine Wisdom we might want to say.  And his whole life he sought to align his thoughts, his speech, and his actions with this Truth. ( In this he reminds me of some of our Desert Fathers.)  And ahimsa (nonviolence) is the language of Truth with which Gandhi calls us to confront the Great Lie and “to take down the sign” in all aspects of life—personal, social, and political—to shatter the façade, the appearance, of what passes as “normal,”  “realistic,” “pragmatic,” etc.   And ahimsa absolutely means much more than just refraining from physical violence; it is non-injury in thought, word, and deed, driven by love and compassion.  Gandhi:  “Nonviolence is not a garment to be put on and off at will. Its seat is in the heart, and it must be an inseparable part of our being.”

Consider now that iconic scene of the Temptation of Jesus in the Wilderness.  The Gospels present a tripartite temptation structure:  1. Temptation based on appetite, a basic human drive.  The Great Lie distorts the meaning and purpose of this bodily function; 2. Temptation based on the reality of power.  Power as the  Great Lie defines it is marked by possession, domination, and inevitably violence; 3. Temptation based on ego/identity, even doubt about who one really is.  (Interestingly enough, the early writings of Buddhism also depict Buddha as undergoing a tripartite temptation ordeal by Mara the Deceiver.)  Recall now that scene in the Gospels when Jesus rebukes Peter, the apparent lead disciple: “Get behind me Satan!”  Jesus had implied that his mission to manifest Divine Wisdom, the Divine Reality, the Truth, would require a total self sacrifice even leading to suffering and death.  Peter objects to such a scenario.   By calling Peter “satan,” Jesus is telling Peter he is totally in the grip and living within the Great Lie.  That kind of religiosity knows nothing of God though it may utter much “God language”.  What is at stake here is our very identity in God….as we are all called to be a manifestation of the Divine Reality.  

One of the most egregious distortions of the Great Lie is aimed at the very notion of nonviolence itself.  All paths of authentic nonviolence go through the heart.  Nonviolence is not just a strategy or a tactic to use to “win” against an opponent; it is not a method or technique of manipulation to be used “against” someone.  It does not recognize anyone as an “enemy” to defeat; it is not anti anyone.  Nonviolence is not simply political, nor all social action, and not just personal—though of course it will encompass all these dimensions of life as we seek the Truth.  Resistance to the Great Lie must take place in all these dimensions, and change will manifest but surely not in the way the Great Lie can recognize.

Michael Nagler, prof. of classics at Berkeley and Gandhian disciple:

“True change is not about putting a different kind of people in power but a different kind of power in people.” 

“….there is a world of difference between calling something evil and calling someone evil. The first strategy mobilizes resources against the problem; the second only recycles the ultimate cause of the problem, which is ill will, resentment, lack of empathy, and eventually hatred.”

“It is the acid test of nonviolence that in a nonviolent conflict there is no rancor left behind, and in the end the enemies are converted into friends.”

Gandhi 

“Gandhi would always offer full details of his plans and movements to the police, thereby saving them a great deal of trouble. One police inspector who availed himself of Gandhi’s courtesy in this matter is said to have been severely reprimanded by his chief. ‘Don’t you know,’ he told the inspector, ‘that everyone who comes into close contact with that man goes over to his side?’”

Reginald Reynolds, in A Quest for Gandhi, Doubleday, 1952

During the 1960s, during the Vietnam war, there was quite a vigorous protest movement against the war effort.  Much of it was non-violent, but certainly there were many occasions when things slipped into a sad confrontation that got swallowed by the Great Lie.   I remember seeing protesters shout, “Hey, hey LBJ, how many babies did you kill today!” or protesters calling soldiers returning from the war “baby killers.”  And all kinds of much worse instances.  Merton wrote about the protests and advised a number of peace activists and leaders.  He definitely supported a resistance to what was going on, but he also had some serious criticism about the way things were unfolding.  Here’s a couple quotes from that period:

“ Nonviolence must simply avoid the ambiguity of an unclear and confusing protest that hardens the warmakers in their self-righteous blindness. This means that in this case above all nonviolence must avoid a facile and fanatical self-righteousness, and refrain from being satisfied with dramatic, self-justifying gestures. . . .  Nonviolence . . . is convinced that the manner in which the conflict for truth is waged will itself manifest or obscure the truth.”

And

“The important thing about protest is not so much the short-range possibility of changing the direction of policies, but the longer range aim of helping everyone gain an entirely new attitude toward war. Far from doing this, much current protest simply reinforces the old positions by driving the adversary back into the familiar and secure mythology of force. Hence the strong ‘patriotic’ reaction against protests in the United States. How can one protest against war without implicitly and indirectly contributing to the war mentality?”  

Merton understood well how difficult the way of nonviolence could be.  In fact it was the journey of a deep spiritual life and its concomitant struggles.  Nonviolence could be a way of life only for courageous people.  Its goal was community, friendship and understanding; not humiliation or “defeat” over an opponent.  So, nonviolent resistance will attack systems and policies of injustice, not the people who happen to be doing the evil.  

“Nonviolence is perhaps the most exacting of all forms of struggle, not only because it demands first of all that one be ready to suffer evil and even face the threat of death without violent retaliation, but because it excludes mere transient self-interest from its considerations. In a very real sense, those who practice nonviolent resistance must commit themselves not to the defense of their own interests or even those of a particular group: they must commit themselves to the defense of objective truth and right and above all of human beings.”

To discern and resist the Great Lie in the public square first of all requires that we discern and resist the Great Lie working on our minds and hearts.  Otherwise we are just trying to defeat an opponent.  And a reshuffling and a recycling of the problem takes place; the villains of one revolution are killed and new ones are established; one war sets the stage for the next war, and so on.  In the early ‘60s Merton was studying the writings of Gandhi when he had this sudden epiphany….from one of his early Journals:

“Today I realize with urgency the absolute seriousness of my need to study and practice non-violence. Hitherto, I have ‘liked’ non-violence as an idea. I have ‘approved’ it, looked with benignity on it, have praised it, even earnestly. But I have not practiced it fully. My thoughts and words retaliate. I condemn and resist adversaries when I think I am unjustly treated. I revile them; even treat them with open (but polite) contempt to their face.  It is necessary to realize…this restricting non-retaliation merely to physical non-retaliation is not enough—on the contrary, it is in some sense a greater evil.   At the same time, the energy wasted in contempt, criticism and resentment is thus diverted from its true function, insistence on truth. Hence, loss of clarity, loss of focus, confusion, and finally frustration. So that half the time I don’t know what I am doing (or thinking).  I need to set myself to the study of non-violence, with thoroughness. The complete, integral practice of it in community life.”

One last thought:  From a Christian perspective we have one more resource in following the way of nonviolence, in our resistance to the Great Lie.  If history is only what Macbeth and Stephen Miller described, only “a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury,” then the Great Lie has dominance;  but no, we have the “eschatological secret” as I alluded to in the previous post in regard to Julian of Norwich, and this means “sound and fury” are not the “last word.”  Love, infinite love defines and encompasses the end and meaning of it all, even our most horrific failings….but in a way we cannot see or comprehend.  Resistance to the Great Lie is already to be living in the eschaton.

And to conclude:

“That’s fine, Dude, I’m not mad at you.”

      Renee Good’s last words to the ICE agent who shot her.  Renee was “taking down the sign” as she died.

You are what your deep, driving desire is. As your desire is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny.
– The Upanishads

Ash Wednesday and Lent are upon us once more, and so a few  reflections, observations, questions arise in our dark days…..  Considering our times and our world, not a bad idea to see Lent as a kind of diagnostic moment of ourselves and our social situation.  Diagnosis means truly examining the symptoms in order to get some kind of handle on the essential problem.  In this case a true diagnosis leads to a transformation of vision, not just elimination of symptoms.  Can’t confuse the symptom for the essence of the problem. Without a proper diagnosis of where we are and who we are, what Lent calls “repentance” becomes a stumbling around in the darkness of our world, and our focus gets reduced to keeping an “inner scorecard” to make ourselves feel better.  True repentance can be called a “return” of sorts to the unspeakable gift of our being, both deeply personal in our hearts and truly collective as we recognize we are fundamentally one; but it is perhaps best seen as a profound transformation of vision.  It is the journey from the “You are dust…” of Ash Wednesday to the Mystery of the Resurrection of Easter Sunday.  

A few examples of “diagnostic moments”:

1.  Been reading Wordsworth lately….always been a bit fascinated by the art and literature of what is termed “Romanticism.”  Given the times we live in this sure seems like a kind of escapism, right?   But consider their times and what was going on in their world about 1800:  the beginnings of industrialization, factories,  pollution and exploitation of nature emerging on a large scale, Adam Smith and the economics of self-interest, the dominance of materialism and rationalism, etc.  The latter affecting even religion and theology where God becomes envisioned and conceptualized as the “Great Clockmaker.”  All of creation is simply this mechanical clock made by God and wound up  Then He sets it aside and lets it run according to the rules of its mechanism…..the whole universe as a great clock.  In any case, the Romantic movement in art and literature is a kind of reaction to all this.  I am not a fan of all their ideas, but I am intrigued by their diagnosis of their times and the dominant themes of their culture.   They certainly picked up on the toxicity of the new economic and intellectual climate and the total ineffectiveness of institutional religion to deal with this; and their anxiety signals this full blast.   But their answers and solutions were not only inadequate but at times actually a part of the problem.  Compared with ancient Chinese Taoist poets, for example, who themselves had to often deal with a violent and suffocating social order, the Romantics seem shallow and at times introducing new problems.  But they do fulfill Ezra Pound’s famous criterion for the artist and thinker:  “A man with a sensitive nose living in a sewer is bound to say something.”  Getting back to Wordsworth, lets take a look at one of his short works (the man was way too wordy in his longer works), a sonnet called, “The World Is Too Much With Us.”

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. —Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

I gathered from the internet a succinct explication of the poem:

“Composed around 1802 and published in 1807, the poem expresses the speaker’s frustration that people are overly focused on ‘getting and spending’(acquiring money and possessions), and in the process, they ‘lay waste our powers’ and lose their ability to be moved by nature’s beauty. 

• Disconnection from Nature: Wordsworth laments that ‘Little we see in Nature that is ours’ because we have ‘given our hearts away’ to modern, trivial concerns. We are ‘out of tune’ with the natural world, failing to appreciate the sea, the winds, and the flowers.
• A ‘Sordid Boon’: The poet calls this focus on worldly gains a ‘sordid boon’ (a wretched blessing), highlighting the irony that what society perceives as progress and advantage is, in fact, a corrupting loss of our deeper spiritual and emotional capacities.
• Yearning for a Simpler Connection: In the poem’s final six lines (the sestet), the speaker expresses a radical wish to be a ‘Pagan suckled in a creed outworn’. This is not an endorsement of ancient religion itself, but a desperate desire for a belief system that would allow him to feel a sense of awe and wonder toward nature again—to see mythical gods like Proteus or Triton rising from the sea—rather than the spiritual emptiness of his contemporary world. “

Yes.  Indeed.  And this reminds me of a 1981 book by historian and cultural critic Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World.  Berman’s main thesis:  the modern, Western worldview has been “disenchanted” by the rise of a mechanistic science that views the natural world as an object to be analyzed and controlled, a mechanical thing rather than a living system of which humanity is a part. He contrasts this with the earlier holistic and animistic traditions that perceived a vital, integrated connection between humanity and the cosmos, which he terms “participatory consciousness.”  (One could also mention here the authentic Native American vision of reality.)

In any case, the diagnosis of the Romantics  is definitely on target and impressive in its scope, but it is hard to see how to move from there toward a “cure.”  And what kind of transformation of vision do they bring to this problem and from where does this transformation emerge? What kind of social, communal metanoia will enable the healing of human fragmentation?  Is the best they have to offer nothing more than a kind of sentimental nostalgia for a fantasized past?   It is also interesting to note how the Romantics were early supporters of the French Revolution, but then they had no answer when the violence and terrorism emerged. 

2.  Now I would like to consider two movies.  The first movie is “It’s a Wonderful Life.”  Ok, this is a classic Christmas favorite (and one of Pope Leo’s favorites), but I would like to reconsider it under the spotlight of Lent and this theme of Lenten diagnosis.  I don’t mean to belabor the obvious difference between the town of Bedford Falls and its possible negative transformation into Potterville or the crucial difference between Mr. Potter and George Bailey.  What I want to focus on is the transformation inside George Bailey.

When we first meet George as a young man, he is eager to leave Bedford Falls and seek out an adventurous life.  He has a certain idea, a certain vision of who he is, of what he should do, of what his personal fulfillment would be, of what the meaning of his life is.  George is a good man with a good heart, but he cannot see, to put it simply, the work that God seeks to accomplish through him…the movie of course does not put it this way.    Inevitably that work gets done with a lot of felt struggle and frustration on George’s part as he stumbles from one problem to another; but interestingly enough through all that he connects with the love of his life, Mary.  But he is still fundamentally blind at this point to the real meaning of his life, unable to even realize that he is afflicted in a manner of speaking.  A real crisis brings about a diagnostic moment that leads to a transformation of vision.  What was needed was a “transcendent perspective,” and that is provided in the movie by the instrumentality of that marvelous angel second class, Clarence.  Here the movie could have slipped into a mawkish, sentimental pop religiosity; but it manages to present it smartly and amusingly.  With a transformed vision George finally sees how grace and divine mercy and compassion flowed into his community through him….without of course any explicit religious language.  

An interesting sidelight:  given the underlying and unspoken spirituality of this movie, it fascinates me that there is also a total silence and absence of formal, institutional religiosity…..no “church moments”!  The movie is emphatically pointing at everyday ordinary life as the ground of our transformation.

The second movie is another old classic, “The Grapes of Wrath.”  A beautiful and powerful adaptation of Steinbeck’s Depression era novel.  It presents the Joad family, poor dirt famers in Oklahoma in the 1930s.  Depression and Dust Bowl and money interests back East lead to the loss of their impoverished farm.  They become migrants to California in order to find work in California’s agricultural fields.  Here I just want a brief focus on two characters:  Tom Joad, the eldest son, who has spent prison time for killing a man in a bar fight and has been released to come back home to find his family has to leave their poor home; and then  Jim Casy, a former preacher who also hooks up with the Joad family in their migration.  Here you find that the diagnosis and the transformation of vision takes place in a slow process, one blurred glimpse of a glimmer after another you might say.  But you catch it early in the movie and by the end you notice Tom sees the world around him and his own pain and feelings differently if not yet in full transparency.  He has been helped in this regard by that other remarkable character, Jim Casy, family friend and former preacher.  They reunite  very early in the movie, and move together through the story until Casy is killed by a goon squad attacking a California work camp.  At one point in the movie Tom recognizes his indebtedness to Casy:

“That Casy. He might have been a preacher but he seen things clear. He was like a lantern. He helped me to see things clear.”

Toward the end of the movie Tom attacks one of the goons who killed Casy and then flees; and now he knows they will be coming after him.  He has to leave the family in the middle of the night, and this is his final talk with his mother:

Tom Joad: I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and good rich land layin’ fallow. Or maybe one guy with a million acres and a hundred thousand farmers starvin’. And I been wonderin’ if all our folks got together and yelled…

Ma Joad: Oh, Tommy, they’d drag you out and cut you down just like they done to Casy.

Tom Joad: They’d drag me anyways. Sooner or later they’d get me for one thing if not for another. Until then…

Ma Joad: Tommy, you’re not aimin’ to kill nobody.

Tom Joad: No, Ma, not that. That ain’t it. It’s just, well as long as I’m an outlaw anyways… maybe I can do somethin’… maybe I can just find out somethin’, just scrounge around and maybe find out what it is that’s wrong and see if they ain’t somethin’ that can be done about it. I ain’t thought it out all clear, Ma. I can’t. I don’t know enough.

Ma Joad: How am I gonna know about ya, Tommy? Why they could kill ya and I’d never know. They could hurt ya. How am I gonna know?

Tom Joad: Well, maybe it’s like Casy says. A fellow ain’t got a soul of his own, just little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody, then…

Ma Joad: Then what, Tom?

Tom Joad: Then it don’t matter. I’ll be all around in the dark – I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look – wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build – I’ll be there, too.

Ma Joad: I don’t understand it, Tom.

Tom Joad: Me, neither, Ma, but – just somethin’ I been thinkin’ about.

There’s a Christological feel to Tom’s emerging vision….”whatsoever you do to one of these little ones, you do to Me.”

But the person that Steinbeck definitely created as a “Christ-figure is Jim Casy…..his initials after all are J.C.!  And when the goons are about to kill him he tells them, “You fellas don’t know what you’re doin’” (And recall Rene Good’s last words: “I’m not mad at you, dude.”)  But Casy is a paradoxical and enigmatic stand-in for Christ—very easy not to see him that way.  In his recent past he was a preacher within a crazy, sick fundamentalist religiosity, and he was immersed in a totally distorted reality.  But at some point, and It’s hard to say if the social crisis was a catalyst for this, he begins a kind of inner and outer diagnostic journey, and you can see that it will lead him to a profound transformation until his murder cuts it short.  Here’s a sequence of quotes from Casy:

“There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do. It’s all part of the same thing. And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain’t nice, but that’s as far as any man got a right to say.”

“I gotta see them folks that’s gone out on the road. I got a feelin’ I got to see them. They gonna need help no preachin’ can give ’em. Hope of heaven when their lives ain’t lived? Holy Sperit when their own sperit is downcast an’ sad? They gonna need help. They got to live before they can afford to die.”

“I ain’t gonna baptize. I’m gonna work in the fiel’s, in the green fiel’s, an’ I’m gonna be near to folks. I ain’t gonna try to teach ’em nothin’. I’m gonna try to learn. Gonna learn why the folks walks in the grass, gonna hear ’em talk, gonna hear ’em sing.”

“Casy said gently, ‘Sure I got sins. Ever’body got sins. A sin is somepin you ain’t sure about. Them people that’s sure about ever’thing an’ ain’t got no sin—well, with that kind of a son-of-a-bitch, if I was God I’d kick their ass right outa heaven! I couldn’ stand ’em!’”

“I ain’t sayin’ I’m like Jesus…But I got tired like Him, an’ I got mixed up like Him, an’ I went into the wilderness like Him, without no campin’ stuff…Sometimes I’d pray like I always done. On’y I couldn’ figure what I was prayin’ to or for. There was the hills, an’ there was me, an’ we wasn’t separate no more. We was one thing. An’ that one thing was holy.”

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
– Marcel Proust

3. Let me start with a simple statement:  We are living in a very dark time.

Now the moment we say this we are immediately and implicitly called to two other statements:  1. Please clarify what this means.  2.  And what should we do about this?

Last month Rene Good, a mother of 3, was shot in the face and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.  A few days later I read an editorial in the National Catholic Reporter that really caught my attention.  It opens up the possibility of an authentic diagnosis of where we are as a people, and at least it points us in the right direction for what to do.  Here is a large segment of that editorial:

“There are moments in a nation’s life when the future does not arrive as a surprise. It announces itself slowly, unmistakably, through patterns we learn to recognize even as we hope we are wrong. When such a moment finally arrives, it feels less like shock than like confirmation: This is where we were headed.

We are living in one of those moments now.

Another life has been taken by the power of the state. The details of what happened in Minneapolis will be argued. ‘Process’ will be invoked. Investigations will promise clarity at some later date. We have learned this choreography well. What matters more than any single finding, however, is the broader realization that the ground beneath us has shifted — and that we are no longer sure who we are.

This is the question that presses upon us now, and it is not one that can be answered by courts, agencies or elections alone: Who have we become?

Not only as voters or citizens, but as a people. As communities. As moral actors living with one another in public space. What habits have we acquired that allow state violence to pass so quickly from outrage to explanation, from grief to acceptance? What has been dulled in us that once would have demanded pause, humility and restraint?

This is the question that presses upon us now, and it is not one that can be answered by courts, agencies or elections alone: Who have we become?

We have become efficient at absorbing what should disturb us….. This did not happen all at once. It happened through repetition. Through the steady expansion of fear as a governing logic. Through the quiet normalization of force as a solution rather than a failure. Through the constant suggestion that safety requires submission and that dissent is a luxury we can no longer afford.

In time, these messages do more than shape policy. They shape character.

From a Christian perspective, this is the heart of the crisis. The tradition we claim does not begin with the management of fear, but with the protection of human dignity. It does not teach that order justifies violence, or that power is vindicated by its ability to dominate. It teaches that every human life bears an inviolable worth that no authority may suspend for convenience or control.

When a society begins to treat lethal force as an ordinary instrument of governance, it has already surrendered something essential — not only justice, but imagination. It can no longer envision safety without coercion, or authority without threat. Violence becomes thinkable. Then acceptable. Then routine.

We keep saying: This is not who we are. But is that true anymore?

Many Americans now describe a feeling that is hard to name but impossible to ignore: estrangement. A sense of being out of place in one’s own country. Not because of disagreement or political loss, but because the moral language of the nation no longer sounds familiar.

It is as if our very souls have left us. Values once spoken aloud — restraint, accountability, the sanctity of life — now feel quaint, even suspect. Our vice president, who considers himself a committed Catholic of solid standing, calls the ICE shooting a tragedy of the victim’s own making.

That dislocation is not accidental. It is the predictable effect of a culture that treats conscience as an obstacle rather than a guide.

At moments like this, it is tempting to locate responsibility entirely ‘out there’ — in leaders, institutions and systems that deserve scrutiny and resistance. But that is only part of the truth. The deeper danger lies closer to home: in our growing belief that nothing we do can matter, that outrage is futile, that resistance is symbolic at best.

Authoritarianism thrives not only on force, but on resignation.

This is why the most urgent task before us is not simply political opposition, but moral recovery. We must relearn what it means to be a people capable of nonviolent resistance — not as a strategy, but as a way of being human together. Nonviolence insists that we remain morally awake even when power tries to numb us. It refuses the lie that cruelty is inevitable and that dignity is expendable.

Nonviolent resistance begins inwardly, with the refusal to let fear shape our vision. But it does not remain there. It takes public form — in witness, in solidarity, in bodies and voices present where silence is expected. It says, quietly and persistently, that there are lines we will not cross, even if the state does.

History offers no comfort to those who wait for perfect conditions before acting. Every meaningful movement toward justice has begun with people who were uncertain, divided, and afraid — but who chose presence over withdrawal and conscience over convenience…….  The problem before us is real, and it is exerting itself forcefully in public life. But the solution does not begin there. It begins in the recovery of belief — belief that conscience still matters, that community still matters, that what we do together can still shape the future.

A nation does not renew itself by force. It renews itself when enough people decide that moral exile is unacceptable — and that dignity, once reclaimed, must be defended in public.

We are, finally, at the crossroads — the one we all knew was coming long before Minneapolis.

What remains unknown is which direction we will take.”

This is good, very good.  And you can’t fault it for not going far enough; it is only an editorial of course.  But it misses something important by (understandingly) limiting itself to the Rene Good killing.  It says: “The problem before us is real, and it is exerting itself forcefully in public life.”  “The problem” is not only very real, but  it has been “before us” for a long, long time.  And where have we been all along, and who have we become in and through all this since…..?  It seems we have been at this crossroads many, many time and have done nothing or just shove  it under the historical rug.    But as even the editorial quietly hints, our diagnosis has to involve both the wide sweep of American history and a deeply personal journey into our own hearts.  From this “higher” vantage point the editorial calls for a response of nonviolent resistance to the darkness of our times.  Seems simple but it is extraordinarily challenging if you understand what it means.  This raises the whole issue far above the level of politics and economics—not that they are unimportant; they are very important.  But true nonviolent resistance seeks a transformed vision both of you and your “adversary,” and a transformed sense of our identity as a people.  In this sense true nonviolent resistance avoids the pitfalls of mistaking the symptoms for what really ails us.  Here on this ground the contemplative and the activist meet, and each contributes something absolutely essential to our common journey and vision.  

Since this is a critically important topic and there is much more that is needed to say, this reflection will continue in the next posting.  Here let us conclude this part with a quote from one of the master teachers of nonviolence in our era, Thomas Merton:

“We must be wary of ourselves when the worst that is in people becomes objectified in society,

approved, acclaimed and deified,

when hatred becomes patriotism and murder a holy duty,

when spying and delation are called love of truth and the stool pigeon is a public benefactor,

when the gnawing and prurient resentments of frustrated bureaucrats

become the conscience of the people and the gangster is enthroned in power,

then we must fear the voice of our own heart, even when it denounces them.

For are we not all tainted with the same poison?”

From “Emblems of a Season of Fury,” 1963

4. Julian of Norwich  

I would like to conclude this reflection by pondering briefly on this most remarkable person. Later this year we need to reflect on her at length….she is so amazing, and I am chagrined to see how I have neglected her.  

 Julian’s years were from about 1343 to 1416.  She seems to have lived a good part of her later adult life as a recluse attached to a town church.  What is important to our reflections here is that she is a profound exemplar of someone who has seen clear through the obscurity, the chaos, the pain of human misery in action and has come through this with a transformed vision that leaves one speechless.  

Julian’s teachings begin and end in joy;  she had a deep experiential realization that this was our origin, and this was our destiny.  Someone might think that she was simply a deluded religious fanatic, or at best a simple person blind to the “reality” of the world.  But she definitely knew the “dark side” of things; she lived in the middle of incredible suffering and instability.  Consider:  the Black Plague killed about 50% of Europe in those years, and her own town of Norwich suffered the same; the Hundred Years War caused enormous chaos and killed thousands; heretics were regularly burned at the stake, and as one commentator said, “Her cell was within smelling distance of her town’s stake”; economic depression was rampant, the Peasants Revolt, riots and unrest.   There is also good indication that Julian was a widow turned anchoress, that she had mothered children and lost both husband and children  during the Plague.   And she also alludes to the fact of some sort of personal illness  that afflicted her.  Certainly this was not a setting for an ordinary, cheerful optimism, and there is nothing ordinary about her!  

Some theologically trained scholars have said that she deserves to be honored as a “Doctor of the Church.”  Her teaching is profound, way beyond standard catechism statements, showing real intelligence with creativity and everyday insight into how people think.  Her “theology,” her spiritual writing and insights, comes from her experience and shows both amazing sophistication and comprehensiveness.  In her personal piety Julian focused on the Passion of Christ.  Modern Christians tend to avoid this in some ways….makes people feel a bit uncomfortable;  but for  medieval people in Europe it mostly became their main focus, beginning from about the time of St. Francis (recall the Stigmata) to especially the late medieval period.

Normally you would not think of Julian as a “Lenten figure,”….she is not crying out to us, “Repent,”….she does not sound like the Prophets, John the Baptist, or some of the saints.  What she brings to us is a transformed vision that transcends the very real limitations of her person, of her situation, of her times….and so also of ours.  Her vision encompasses all of creation:

“And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’  I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.”

And this:

“The Goodness that is Nature is God. He is the ground, He is the substance, He is the same thing that is Naturehood. And He is very Father and very Mother of Nature.”

But she peers into the darkness of human distortions as history unfolds and she is not afraid to question the Divine Work:

“Ah, good Lord, how could all things be well, because of the great harm which has come through sin to your creatures?” 

“…deeds are done which appear so evil to us and people suffer such terrible evils that it does not seem as though any good will ever come of them; and we consider this, sorrowing and grieving over it so that we cannot find peace in the blessed contemplation of God as we should do; and this is why: our reasoning powers are so blind now, so humble and so simple, that we cannot know the high, marvelous wisdom, the might and the goodness of the Holy Trinity. And this is what He means where He says, ‘You shall see for yourself that all manner of things shall be well’, as if he said, ‘Pay attention to this now, faithfully and confidently, and at the end of time you will truly see it in the fullness of joy.’”

For many of us there is an understandable temptation to see our personal history and our collective history as a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”(Shakespeare’s Macbeth).  Not Julian.  She sees clearly the darkness; she does not say it is “not real.”  She knows intimately the reality of pain, suffering, human frailty.  But in all this she becomes an incredible beacon of divine light; she becomes the bearer of a transcendent divine gift, what some theologians have called the “eschatological secret”….but she is privy not to WHAT it is but simply that It Is.  

“AND thus our good Lord answered to all the questions and doubts that I might make, saying full comfortably: I may make all thing well, I can make all thing well, I will make all thing well, and I shall make all thing well; and thou shalt see thyself that all manner of thing shall be well.” 

“See that I am God. See that I am in everything. See that I do everything. See that I have never stopped ordering my works, nor ever shall, eternally. See that I lead everything on to the conclusion I ordained for it before time began, by the same power, wisdom and love with which I made it. How can anything be amiss?”

“But Jesus, who in this Vision informed me of all that is necessary for me, answered and said: It was necessary that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” 

“For this is the Great Deed that our Lord shall do, in which Deed He shall save His word and He shall make all well that is not well. How it shall be done there is no creature beneath Christ that knoweth it, nor shall know it till it is done.”  

“Do you want to know what your Lord meant? Know well that love was what he meant. Who showed you this? Love. What did he show? Love. Why did he show it to you? For Love. Hold fast to this and you will know and understand more of the same.”

Hints and traces of this eschatological secret can also be found in various Christian figures…. like Origin, Clement of Alexandria, Isaac the Syrian, Maximus the Confessor, etc.….even Merton and Karl Rahner could be included.  And for those of us who call ourselves Christians, this eschatological secret may be the whole point of turning/returning to a nonviolent life.

To be continued…..

Some Lenten homework:  Take a look at these two short clips on You Tube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE_Tl9ovDIo

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTHyAde49eg

Continuing these reflections inspired by the publishing of the Merton conferences at the Monastery of the Redwoods in 1968…..  It will be a kind of potpourri of themes and insights which the reader is invited to “put it all together”!

Coleman McCarthy, who had been a Trappist monk for a few years and who later became a noted journalist and peace activist, wrote an article in the National Catholic Reporter in Dec. of 1967 criticizing his old order. He said the Trappists’ Marine-like “hairy-chestedness” and “French Foreign Legion” heroics led them “to do hard things instead of good things.”  He argued that Bonhoeffer’s “secular city” had replaced Thomas Merton’s “seven-storey mountain” as “the address of God.” Noting Bonhoeffer’s admonition — “A Christian must plunge himself into the life of a godless world” — McCarthy concluded a monastery “was where the action wasn’t.”  Needless to sat Merton was a bit upset!  (Later they dialogued through correspondence and began to appreciate each other….McCarthy later even defended the place of monks in the scheme of life.)  At that time Merton was teaching the novices and other monks at Gethsemani about the Sufi path.   

Merton at the beginning of one of these talks at Gethsemani:

“I am the biggest Sufi in Kentucky though I admit
there is not much competition.”

Then he goes on:

“Who wants mystical theology in a monastery?!”, says he mischievously. “That’s almost as bad as bootlegging or something! The last thing in the world any modern, progressive Catholic wants to hear about is mystics… I sort of throw it at you with a Moslem disguise or something like that in which it is more acceptable….  Now, we’ll talk about Sufism. Sufism is a very strange subject, and it should be kept a strange subject. Don’t ever let anybody ever get up here, or anywhere else, and give you a course on Sufism.  Because anybody who is giving you a course on Sufism is giving you a false bill of goods, and anyway, what do you suppose Sufism is all about?”

This is “perfect Merton”!  At times he was accused of being too whimsical/superficial in talking about other religious traditions, but that is simply misunderstanding what he is doing and his manner of pedagogy.  Merton was not so much trying to “defend” monasticism—he was very critical of it in his own way—what he was most after is people understanding what the contemplative path was and its importance….wherever lived…..  Recall:  “Prayer is the great thing.”  And the Sufi path is most helpful in getting some sense of that.

Obviously Merton was interested in many different spiritual traditions, both Christian and non-Christian, and benefited from all of them to a greater or lesser extent.  Sometimes he learned something really new that enhanced and enriched his own journey; sometimes he discovered a new language and a new insight into what had gotten to be stale language and repeated without deep understanding in his own tradition.  It is very clear that Zen and ancient Taoism appealed to him very deeply and helped him enormously.  It is not so evident that Islamic mysticism, the Sufi path, made that kind of impact on his spiritual life, but that was precisely the case.  Merton had read widely in Sufi circles, both classic and modern; but it was the personal contacts that helped him the most.  He had a lengthy period of correspondence with Abdul Aziz, a Pakistani Sufi; he got to personally know Reza Arasteh, an Iranian scholar, psychoanalyst, and a Sufi, whose book, Final Integration, deeply impressed Merton; and then there was the meeting with an authentic Sufi teacher.  In 1966, Sufi master Sidi Abdeslam visited the Abbey of Gethsemani to meet with Merton. Abdeslam was from the spiritual lineage of Shaikh Ahmad al-Alawi. Merton was deeply moved by the Sufi master, describing him as a “remarkable person” and comparing the

experience of meeting him to encountering one of the ancient Christian Desert Fathers.

Merton, in a letter to Abdul Aziz:

“I am tremendously impressed with the solidity and intellectual sureness of Sufism. I am stirred to the depths of my heart by the intensity of Moslem piety toward His names, and the reverence with which He is invoked as the ‘Compassionate and the Merciful.’ May He be praised and adored everywhere forever.” 

From Mariam Davids, a contemporary woman Sufi teacher:

“Who Is a Real Sufi? And Who Is Just Wearing the Cloak?

In life, when you see a person dressed in white, head slightly bowed, prayer beads in hand, always talking softly about love and silence. And the heart immediately whispers, “He must be a Sufi…” Right?

But here’s the thing, my dear readers—just because someone looks like a Sufi doesn’t mean the fragrance is there too. Because in the garden of Tasawwuf (Sufism), not every flower blooms with the same fragrance.

In fact, the path of Tasawwuf is not something new or modern—it’s not a trend that started a few centuries ago. It’s ancient, timeless, and sacred. It’s the hidden spirit within the body of religion. It’s that quiet pulse running through the practices of the prophets, the truthful ones (siddiqeen), and the friends of Allah (Aulia Allah) for centuries.

And the real haqiqi Sufis? Oh SubhanAllah!, they’ve always been here. Quietly, sincerely, working on their inner world while living in ours.

There’s a beautiful teaching in the circles of the people of tariqah (the spiritual path), that speaks of three kinds of Sufis…..:

1. The Real Sufi (صُوفِيّ)

This is someone who has completely erased themselves. Their ego? Gone. Their will? Melted into Allah’s ﷻ will. They are baaqi billah—alive only through Allah ﷻ. Human desires no longer control them. And here’s the amazing part—they become masters of spiritual truths, deeply aware of the reality behind everything. They walk the earth lightly, but their hearts are in the Divine Presence.

2. The Aspiring Sufi (مُتَصَوِّف)

This is the seeker—sincere and striving. They’re not fully there yet, but they’re trying. You’ll find them in night vigils, fasting by day, doing zikr, salawat, istaghfaar, doing mujahadah (struggle against the self), walking step by step behind the real Sufis, hoping to polish their heart enough to reflect the Divine light. They haven’t arrived—but they’ve started the journey with love.

3. The Imitation Sufi (مُشْتَبِه)

Ah Allah Allah, this is the tricky one. Outwardly, everything looks perfect—tasbih in hand, soft speech, long prayer mats. But inside? Astaghfirullah! It’s not for Allah ﷻ. It’s for position, for popularity, for ego and nafs. They fast, they pray, they do zikr—but it’s all a performance. The robes of the Sufi are there, but the heart is still hungry for the dunya. The beauty is only on the outside.

This is a deep, gentle warning for us all: not to be fooled by appearances, and more importantly—not to fool ourselves. Because the path of Tasawwuf is a path of truth, and truth always begins with the self.

Because at the end of the day, only He knows what’s in the heart.

Let’s try to be from the second kind, if not the first. Let’s not fall into the third. Let’s be seekers—even if we stumble, even if we’re weak—because Allah ﷻ loves those who walk toward Him with sincerity.

And maybe, just maybe… one day He’ll pull us into that silent, fragrant circle of the true Sufis—those who forgot themselves and remembered only Him.

اللّٰهُمَّ “

Interesting how this echoes Merton’s own guidance concerning monastic/contemplative life.

Nasrudin

Nasruddin may be a historical Sufi figure from about the 13^th century—nobody knows for sure. In any case, a large number of stories became associated with him over the centuries.  In essence they are Sufi teaching stories, which can be read at many levels: for humor, as a joke of sorts; as a story with a moral twist; or as a kind of opening to something truly deep on the Sufi path.  This last will be available only through a living Sufi teacher and applicable in a very personal way to a particular individual on their particular path.  At the Redwoods gathering Merton tells two Nasrudin stories.  The first one is a little bit clearer to grasp on all three levels; the second one Merton admits he has no idea what it might mean on the spiritual level.  So….the first one goes like this:

On one occasion a neighbor found Nasrudin down on his knees looking for something.
‘What have you lost, Mulla?’
‘My key,’ said Nasrudin.
After a few minutes of searching, the other man said,
‘Where did you drop it?’
‘At home.’
‘Then why, for heaven’s sake, are you looking here?’
‘There is more light here.’

Just one comment:  There is a tendency in us to “look” for God in the wrong places; and the “wrong places” are characterized by being on the one hand as “easy,” “obvious,” recognizable; and on the other hand the “wrong places” will always have a certain very personal and unique character for each person.

The true, essential Sufi teaching unfolds in a primarily oral culture….between a Sufi and his teacher/guide.  What we “outsiders” see seems cryptic, perplexing, paradoxical…the language is always a kind of allusion, not a direct pointing to the essence of the matter. 

Two words which have a great significance in Sufi discourse: hidden, secret.  These have both an interior and exterior significance.  As Merton points out, the real Sufi life is a hidden form which cannot be expressed anyway; the hidden life of secret friendship with God.  In one of the conferences at Redwoods Merton points  out some interesting parallels in the Christian Desert Father era:  Paphnutius.  He was a disciple of Antony and a legendary hermit.  One day, as he is in prayer, he  asks God, “Lord, if there is anyone around here as holy as I, show me who it is.”  So the Lord immediately shows him this dancer in the town.  Paphnutius goes into the town  and asks him, “How come you’re so holy?”  And he says, “Who me?”  Now there’s different versions of this story….Paphnutius finds a married couple…or three married women…but the basic theme is always the same: the person who is living the full monastic ideal is shown a higher state of life…the state of the person who’s completely hidden.  (And by the way think about this,  what is more “secret” or more “hidden” than the Divine Reality on the Cross!)  Merton also relates the Syrian legend of Theophilus and Mary:

“They lived together chastely, but he pretended he was a juggler and she pretended she was a very wild girl.  So they were reviled by the populace.  Everybody thought they were just a bunch of hippies….  Of course, they’re forerunners of the idea of the Russian ‘Fool for Christ’….So, the Sufis emphasize this very strongly…like the Rhenish mystics, the idea of being ‘secret friends of God.’  Ruysbroeck has this terrific lineup of ‘hidden children’ and ‘secret friends.’ The real top of the ladder for Ruysbroeck  is being a ‘secret friend’ in which this union with God is completely hidden, even from oneself” [underlining is mine].

I think this whole thing also played out to some degree in Merton’s own life:  the way he undermined the image people liked to project on him, both conservatives and liberals; the way he deconstructed his supposed “roles” that both sides wanted him to play out.  At times he did it deliberately; at other times it just came “naturally.”   I won’t go into the serious examples, but there are some light and charming episodes.  One such took place in late 1966 when Joan Baez and Ira Sandperl visited him at Gethsemani.  They had just founded an institute to train leaders in nonviolent resistance, and they were going to use materials written by Merton, among others.  Ira had corresponded with Merton, but Joan had not engaged him at all—he was simply a “monk with a reputation”!  She did not know what to expect…most likely a solemn serious person.  They met Merton at his hermitage; she was quite surprised how he did not fit her image of a monk/hermit.  Later on she described him as being “sweet and funny.”  He was very open in his discussions with them, even telling them about his falling in love with a young nurse in Louisville.  They were so taken by this that they volunteered to drive him there that very evening if he wanted to see her again.  He gratefully turned down the offer, but then he said, lets go and get some burgers and shakes.  His simplicity and humanity affected them deeply.

This reminds one of Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima who had tea and cakes with ladies in his cell—in contrast to the strict ascetic Ferapont.  When Zosima dies, Alyosha, his disciple, has a faith crisis….his Elder’s body corrupts very rapidly making everybody say that this is a sign that he was obviously a corrupt monk.  Sometimes  it is God who conceals his holy ones!

During the conferences at Redwoods Merton mentions Freud approvingly several times.  For Merton, Freud has a partial handle on a partial part of our problem.  Interiorly we are a vortex of conflicting feelings and Impulses, a mishmash of fears, anxieties, desires, “mirages of need,” etc.  Freud  points out that within that context it is truly a struggle to garner some deep meaning for one’s life and  inevitably there will be the corrosive uncertainties that plague human existence.  Merton said that this is very applicable to monastic life (and we could add to anyone trying to walk a contemplative path).  (The holy Athonite hermit of the 19^th century, Silouan, heard the Lord’s voice in his heart as he struggled in prayer: ‘Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.’)  Merton:  “….the real key to renewal in our life is the acceptance of this fact, and the thing that’s blocking renewal is an unconscious resistance against this.  There is a kind of conservatism, which is very well meant, but which attempts to create a life in which there are no ‘torturing’ uncertainties.  It attempts to suppress the uncertainties and the risks that go with doing something different.  And that is deadly.  That is the real bad thing about conservatism: that it refuses to allow a struggle to take place.”

Instead, the novice monk, according to Merton, too often is unable to develop into a real person from the socially-formed ego with a “storm” within and a fragile socially-conditioned sense of identity.   He/she is indoctrinated into a role and given an external identity…..with the habit on, you are somebody….habit off, who are you?….inside the enclosure you are somebody….outside, who are you?  Etc.  Again, recall this is Merton speaking in 1968….he points out that the nuns are especially victimized by this:

“One of the main roles is the role of ‘nun.’  That has become so much a role; that is to say, you fit into it.  It’s a real easy category, and the whole thing is arranged in such a way that it’s very easy to fit into it as a category and to get lost in it as a category.  Very often people are content to settle for a role and a category rather than to have to be a person; and sometimes the religious life is made easy for that kind of evasion….  What nuns have to be is persons, and that may mean going exactly the opposite of what had to be done before.  It may have to be a totally different process.  Everything that we have or what we wear, what we do, has to imply some kind of a reasonable choice on this whole point of, ‘Is it a symbol that I have accepted bondage as a woman?  Or is it a symbol that I have accepted freedom as a bride of Christ?’  That’s what everybody has to help with, but that’s what the ‘official’ people are trying not to do.” 

Modern consciousness says that you are this individual ego; this ego is to be well integrated into society, and, if this society is “sick,” you are going to be “sick”;  you are given a number as it were, an identity; and it calls this “being a person.”  But both for Merton and the Sufis the goal is a transformed reality,  a someone who has struggled and broken through to a sense of personhood that is no longer dependent on any external, arbitrary, socially-constructed markers, a sense of identity that is no longer tossed about by the inevitable illusions and unrealities that flood our minds and emotions and interactions.  Merton numerous times in the conferences refers to St. Paul’s message in his Letters about the freedom now of the person “in Christ” (and how we seem to be reading Paul’s words over and over and numb to their radical meaning).  The roles and categories and markers of social life are still there but you are no longer defined by them, nor do you draw your sense of identity from them.  

Who you are, your real identity, is God’s secret, and so it is truly “in God.”  This secret is God’s innermost knowledge of me.  And I am only real and only truly known as I am this unique “I in God.” For Sufis, the primary faculty of a human being is the “heart,” whereby a human being “knows” the Divine Reality and in turn experiences itself as “being known” uniquely by the Divine Reality.  This is your real identity, who you really are, your true personhood, and it is only real as it is “in God.”  You begin to experience this at the deepest core/center of your being; and Merton, borrowing language from the Sufis, calls it an “awakening from the dream of forgetfulness” which is our usual everyday social self.   This awakening journey, then, is properly called “prayer.”  All other uses of that word are merely derivative, fleeting shadows and signs of what it’s really all about.  At the conference Merton quotes Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Sufi and scholar, “Prayer in this sense then makes and transforms man until he himself becomes prayer; he becomes identified with it.  And his real nature is the prayer in which he discovers who he really is.”  Merton then continues:  “That’s a good expression of what the prayer life means: in prayer man finds his true identity….  Instead of being hung up on an image and a narcissistic self-awareness, in prayer,  a person really finds himself….”  The proper climate of this deep prayer, of this deep awakening, no matter who you are, an activist or a monk hidden in a monastery, is silence, solitude, poverty of spirit….”the desert”….in one form or another….

Now we need to step back a bit and look at the big picture.  The Quran’s very first verse declares that God is All-Merciful and All-Compassionate. We Christians profess that we have that same view, but it somehow seems muted and diluted….  Another verse says, “His Mercy covers all things.”  And Islam means All things (and so should we)!  The key point is that our very being, our very existence is a work and a sign of His Mercy.  In His Mercy He calls us out of nothingness into being every moment or else we would cease to be.  Every moment, every breath is grounded in the Divine Mercy.  Every twig, every leaf, every little bird, every star, each and every human being is called into being every moment by the Divine Mercy (and consequently existing within the knowledge of God).  Now a human being is a very special and peculiar creature in that God chooses to manifest Himself in our human consciousness.  Our “knowledge” of God, or perhaps to put it better, our deepest awareness of the Divine Reality, is simply the “flip  side” of God’s secret knowledge of us, which is “in Him” and which is our true identity in Him.  Or as Meister Eckhart put it succinctly:  “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” 

So the Divine Mercy calls us into existence every moment, and with every breath we say that Biblical, “Here I am.”   Merton:  “Being itself is mercy.  Existence is mercy.  The mere fact that one has been called into existence is a gift of God’s mercy.”  Then, our very being at its core is a Great Yes to this call. This is the givenness of our life, and every created reality participates in this Great Yes in its own way.  The cat sleeping on the couch praises and thanks its Creator in its very being.  It praises the Divine Reality as its life unfolds totally within what we call the “will of God,” that is, within the Divine Action, the Divine Mercy,  totally.  It is always doing the “will of God”—think of the “purity” of wild nature….!  What makes us “special/different” is that the very meaning of our existence is to affirm that Great Yes with our own truly personal, unique, small yes….to the “will of God” as it manifests and comes to us in our unique life….this is the ground of our true personhood, our authentic uniqueness, and the real meaning of our freedom.  As Merton points out, in monastic life this is the real significance of St. Benedict’s emphasis on the vow of obedience.  For the rest of us (and actually for the monks also in their everyday life), it comes down to a silent, dark (in the sense that it is totally in faith) surrender to and an abiding in the Divine Mercy no matter how it unfolds in our life, a wordless awareness, an unthematic attentiveness….  This is another aspect of deep prayer.   And, yes, this will inevitably plunge us into struggles, doubt, a “dark night” indeed.  Until one day we awake to our own personal meaning of St. Paul’s “I live now, not I, but Christ lives in me”; and Augustine’s “God is closer to me than I am to myself.” 

From Isaiah 42:16:

“And I will lead the blind

in a way that they do not know,

in paths that they have not known

I will guide them.

I will turn the darkness before them into light,

the rough places into level ground.

These are the things I do,

and I do not forsake them.”

There is no program for this, no plan, no method, no system….and Merton warns about contemplative people making a “project” of their prayer life.  He makes a strong statement at the conference, and he can easily be misunderstood but the guidance is there for those who can hear it.  Merton says (and remember that here Merton is speaking to people experienced in Catholic religious life, monastic and active) that in our active life….  “You have to figure things out.  You have to plan action and do things, but in prayer—no. The best way to pray is just simply to stop, and let prayer pray itself in you, whether you know it or not.  This is the best way to pray—and this works.  Then you don’t have to know it.  You don’t have to even look to see if you’re praying, and to look and see if you’re praying is a great mistake….”

“What this is, is a deep underground awareness of finality that is built right into our being, and is renewed in us by God.  This finality is a kind of identity.  Our deepest identity is not just that we are constituted as human individuals, but that we are constituted in a special kind of Christlike being, by God’s call to come to Him.  So that what our prayer life does, is that it gets right down to this root  identity of the self that is called into being by God’s direct word; ‘Come.  Come follow me.  Come to Me.  Come to the Father.’  Prayer, and everything else in our life, has to be built around that central thing, which is inaudible.  You don’t hear it, but it is the very depths of your being, and the very depths of your identity.  The trouble with all that is said about the life of prayer is that it tends to obscure this, and tends to make us forget that this is the fundamental thing.”

Merton continues: “Another thing that’s forgotten about the life of prayer is we say, ‘Alright, it’s a life of faith.’  Sure, it’s a life of faith.  But it’s also a life of doubt.  If you never doubt, you can’t pray.  You have to doubt.  It’s necessary in the life of prayer to struggle with doubt.  And once again, that is the trouble with all this hard and fast safe Rule thing: ‘If I get to the end of the day,  and I’ve kept every little rule from morning to night, then I have no reason to doubt.  I’m justified.  So why should I doubt whether I’m justified or not?’  This gets back to this central thing in faith.  It’s not by the work of prayer that I’m justified….   And if I’ve prayed all day, it does not make me any better than if I haven’t prayed all day.  See what I mean?  All of these things have to be absolutely fundamental, because otherwise, I have another kind of identity.  I have an identity of somebody who has become somebody by praying.  ‘I have prayed.  Now I’m me.  I am the man who  prayed all day.’  And you come away from prayer with a placard on your chest, ‘God, you know who I am.  I am the man who prayed all day.’”

And now lets conclude this posting and all our reflections on Merton at Redwoods with this most remarkable quote.  In all his writings and letters and journals, Merton never really exposed his very own deep prayer life….except once….in a letter to his Sufi friend, Abdul Aziz.  Aziz had asked Merton to tell him about his own prayer life.  Merton wrote back: 

“Strictly speaking I have a very simple way of prayer. It is centered entirely on attention to the presence of God and to His will and His love. That is to say that it is centered on faith by which alone we can know the presence of God. One might say this gives my meditation the character described by the Prophet as ‘being before God as if you saw Him.’ Yet it does not mean imagining anything or conceiving a precise image of God, for to my mind this would be a kind of idolatry. On the contrary, it is a matter of adoring Him as invisible and infinitely beyond our comprehension, and realizing Him as all. My prayer tends very much toward what you call fana [‘annihilation’]. There is in my heart this great thirst to recognize totally the nothingness of all that is not God. My prayer is then a kind of praise rising up and out of the center of Nothing and Silence. If I am still present ‘myself’ this I recognize as an obstacle about which I can do nothing unless He Himself removes the obstacle. If He wills, He can then make the Nothingness into a total clarity. If He does not will, then the Nothingness seems to itself to be an object and remains an obstacle. Such is my ordinary way of prayer, or meditation. It is not ‘thinking about’ anything, but a direct seeking of the Face of the Invisible, which cannot be found unless we become lost in Him who is Invisible.”

To write about prayer is a hazardous endeavor.  Misunderstandings, misreadings, flawed perspectives, etc. can run rampant.  And then of course this very project of writing/reading/understanding can replace the very reality one is pondering.  Consider this quote from Merton in one of his talks at Redwoods:

“The talking, although important, isn’t the principal thing.  Nothing that anybody says is going to be important.  The great thing is prayer.  Prayer itself.  If you want a House of Prayer {he’s addressing the active religious in the gathering}  the way to get to it is by praying.   And if you want a life of prayer, the way to get it is by praying.  We were indoctrinated to think so much in terms of means and ends—technologically achieving ends—we don’t realize that there’s a different dimension in the life of prayer.  In the life of prayer you start where you are.  You deepen what you already have.  And you realize that you’re already there.”

Perfect…and funny.  Here’s a guy who has written and spoken tens of thousands of words about prayer saying this, and you might think he is contradicting himself, his very teaching.  But no,  I think we get what he is pointing to.  It is easy to get enchanted by and lost in the words of good spiritual writers like Merton himself, like Abhishiktananda, like Louf, like Rohr, like even the great spiritual classics, etc.  And the danger is that we substitute the words for the reality—Merton’s “zen-mind” made him very sensitive to that.  And there is something even more critical, more hazardous in our overrelying on any verbal “spiritual maps” out there or even worse on “well-planned programs of spiritual growth.”  This should be principle #1:  everyone’s spiritual journey, spiritual life, spiritual path, everyone’s prayer life is absolutely unique.  This is very, very Important.  Yes, there are significant common patterns to all spiritual journeys, similar dynamics in all spiritual lives, recognizable markers on all spiritual paths; but the bottom line is that nameless, absolutely unique element within this life and this prayer that makes it “my life, my prayer.”  Yes, you can and you should get helpful insights, illuminating guidance, etc. from all these marvelous spiritual writers, but never forget: your life is your path….which is no-path….and it will not fit any pattern from any book….modern or ancient….and all attempts to make it fit will be futile.   Merton himself, by the way, was an excellent example of this…and so a master teacher.

When we use the word “prayer,” lets be clear that we are not referring to liturgical prayer strictly speaking, nor to simple prayers of petition in our moments of need, nor to what some people called “personal prayer,” like saying the rosary or some other such devotions….although all these can be involved in our journey into deep prayer.   What we are most emphatically referring to has usually been called “contemplative prayer,” but also with other terms…like “prayer of the heart.”  Merton points out that the word “contemplation” is somewhat ambiguous and misleading.  It infers a subject-object relationship: there is this reality “in front of you,” “out there,” which you
“contemplate.”  No, that is not what Merton means when he speaks of “prayer,” contemplative or whatever else you want to call it.  (And also its horrible misuse in calling a certain grouping of people as “contemplatives.”  Merton says it was a designation reserved for religious that were locked up in “cold storage”….especially the nuns!).  Merton prefers the simple term, “prayer,” or maybe “deep prayer,” or the classic, “prayer of the heart.”  But he is also quite willing to use the problematic word “contemplative” as long as it is correctly understood.

Merton tells of a tiff he got into with Fr. McNamara of the Spiritual Life Institute, the Carmelite hermit group that he started in the ‘60s as a modern version of the ancient hermit ideal (and it also evaporated).  Merton had written somewhere that people who wanted to lead lives of deep prayer should not be trying to “think about God all the time”—“Don’t keep God in your mind all the time…it will exhaust you, it will be futile, it won’t lead to anything like contemplative prayer,” he would teach his novices.  McNamara wrote to him complaining that his teaching was contradictory to the teachings of the old masters who said our goal was to be “continual prayer.”  Merton had to write back explaining that continual prayer is not a matter of constantly thinking about God but rather a kind of deep awareness of the Divine Presence in all reality….and that in fact the old masters also said that the highest form of prayer is when you don’t know you’re praying!  Very zen-like!  

In order to better grasp Merton’s teaching on prayer of the heart we need to divert to Merton’s view of modern consciousness to which he alludes many times in these conferences and is critical in his understanding of all approaches to contemplative prayer.  The key word to describe modern consciousness is  “alienation.”  In Christian theology and spirituality this is simply what we call “the Fall,” “Original Sin.”  So in a sense it has been with us from the beginning, but for the last few centuries more and more enhanced and exacerbated as first the Divine Reality is reduced to a concept we can argue about instead of it being a lived experience; and then this concept is deemed not needed nor wanted and all of society and civilization is built on a foundation of sand and your own reality is no more than “dust.”  Recall Genesis 3: 8-19….”dust you are and to dust you shall return”…..alienation delineated in Biblical imagery and language.   In modern terms we have bewilderment, loss, guilt, disorientation, helplessness, meaninglessness, estrangement, distance, etc.  Alienation means our experience of ourselves as radically separate individuals…therefore a sense of loss of real community (like Merton realizing that in his special experience in Louisville at Fourth and Walnut, described in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander).  Attempts to build community on a totally secular vision end up like the Tower of Babel Myth.  Alienation also means our experience of separateness from wild nature….nature is merely a resource “out there” to exploit.  But most Importantly, alienation also means there is this most profound loss of a sense of our deep self, our center, our “heart” if you will, in effect our separation from whom we really are, where we are one with God.  Instead we live our everyday life on the level of this exterior self,  this “I” which traffics in illusion and falsity as it tries to establish meaning and purpose for itself.  Whatever this self manages to establish, however, it is so fragile and tenuous, like a puff of smoke, that it can rightfully be termed as “unreal,” and the consequent result is a deep sense of insecurity, anxiety, fear, etc.  Western writers, artists and philosophers have all wrestled with this phenomenon one way or another:  Kafka, the master storyteller of alienation.  As an example recall his remarkable symbolic story, “The Metamorphosis,” where Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning having been mysteriously turned into an “ungeziefer,” sometimes translated as “cockroach”!  Or consider Camus who saw modern man engaged in a Sisyphean effort to roll this boulder up the  hill in a futile “effort to overcome the muteness of existence”(as one critic put it). Or Andy Warhol, the consummate artist depicting the superficiality and commodification in modern life and its enhancement of the transient.  In 1968, one of his exhibits proclaimed, “In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.”

 On the ordinary everyday level this exterior ego self seeks to maximize his/her experiences because it has a desperate need “to be somebody,” as if that were to buttress our lives in the face of death.  To be recognized, accepted, valued, esteemed, appreciated, admired, etc.  this is the passion underlying all efforts, all achievements, all self-promotions, etc……all this underlies the seeking of power, wealth, fame, etc.

Needless to say, this alienation has a deleterious effect on any spiritual journey.  As Merton puts it:  “The call to contemplation is not, and cannot, be addressed to such an ‘I,’”  So what happens when this person turns up at the gates of the monastery or simply at the gates of the contemplative path?  Merton has a brutally detailed description of what happens interiorly:

“If such an ‘I’ one day hears about ‘contemplation,’ he will perhaps set himself to ‘become a contemplative.’  That is, he will wish to admire in himself something called contemplation.  And in order to see it, he will reflect on his alienated self.  He will make contemplative faces at himself like a child in front of a mirror.  He will cultivate the contemplative look that seems appropriate to him and that he likes to see  in himself.  And the fact that his busy narcissism is  turned within and feeds upon itself in stillness and secret love will make him believe that his experience of himself is an experience of God.   But the exterior ‘I,’ the ‘I’ of projects, of temporal finalities, the ‘I’ that manipulates objects in order to take possession of them, is alien from the hidden, interior ‘I’ who has no projects and seeks to accomplish nothing, even contemplation…..

Sad is the case of that exterior self that imagines himself contemplative, and seeks to achieve contemplation as the fruit of planned effort and of spiritual ambition.  He will assume varied attitudes, meditate on the inner significance of his own postures, and try to fabricate for himself a contemplative identity: and all the while there is nobody there.  There is only an illusory fictional ‘I’ which seeks itself, struggles to create itself out of nothing, maintained in being by its own compulsion and the prisoner of his private illusion.”

(This quote is from a short masterpiece of his, The Inner Experience, which along with Contemplative Prayer, another insightful piece, illumine a lot of what he has to say in these conferences at Redwoods.)

Now Merton is NOT talking about some “bad contemplatives” somewhere out there—“Thank God I am not like those people,” a temptation here, right?  No, he is saying this about ALL of us, no exceptions, Merton included,  It is a “been there, done that” statement on behalf of all of us, more or less, now and then.  We come to this gate in bad shape, but something in us has been awakened.  Merton loves to invoke the Sufi/Islamic vision:  God is All-Mercy, All-Compassion everywhere and always; and so the Divine Mercy is awakening us in all our situations, no matter how bad, how confused, how lost….  But at first this call to awakening will feel like a very negative thing: a sense that we are not who we should be, a sense of lostness perhaps, of seeking some ground of meaning to stand on, a dim realization that society, social life will not satisfy what is nagging at our hearts, etc.  Consider these two moments from Genesis:  Adam and Eve after the Fall…God asks them, “Where are you?”  And Cain  after he murders his brother Abel, God asks him, “Where is your brother?”  God is not seeking information in these questions!  That “where” is intended for their hearts and our hearts, an awakening to the condition we are in.  That “where are you” is also a question of “who are you,” a self-questioning  and an awakening to one’s estrangement from your real self, your heart, and only this self can be in the Divine Presence everywhere and at all times.  Merton, again:

“….social life, so-called ‘worldly life,’ in its own way promotes this  illusory and narcissistic existence to the very limit.  The curious state of alienation and confusion of man in modern society is perhaps more ‘bearable’ because it is lived in common, with a multitude of distractions and escapes—and also with opportunities for fruitful action and genuine Christian self-forgetfulness.  But underlying all life is the ground of doubt and self-questioning which sooner or later must bring us face to face with the ultimate meaning of our life. This self-questioning can never be without a certain existential ‘dread’—a sense of insecurity, of ‘lostness,’ of exile, of sin.  A sense that one has somehow been untrue not so much to abstract moral or social norms but to one’s own inmost truth.  ‘Dread’ in this sense…is the profound awareness that one is capable of ultimate bad faith with himself and with others: that one is living a lie.”

 Merton was very impressed and truly influenced by Sufi teachings.  This is obvious in the conferences at Redwoods.  He was particularly struck by the fact that a Muslim became a Sufi not in order to be a “better Muslim,” but he/she was looking for a complete transformation, a finding of their true heart, and a total surrender to the Divine Reality.  This is the path of deep prayer, contemplative prayer.  Merton pointed out time and again that this was what contemplative monastic life was all about, and this is what it should open up for the people that showed up at its  gate with all their spiritual problems.  Did it?  In his read of it and his experience the situation was very ambiguous, and the answer would be, largely no.  Traditional monastic life had mostly ossified into indoctrinating the young monk into the “contemplative mystique”(somewhere Merton says that in most “contemplative communties” there are very few true contemplatives)—won’t get into that here, but it was simply a “religious” version of what the young monk had left behind. Often devout, pious young people came to monastic life trying to respond to a silent call within their heart, “Friend, come up higher.” But instead of being helped to see that they are being called/led to a total transformation of heart and consciousness, they became trained to act in a certain “holy” way, play a role, like you play a certain role in society; the image, you want to “look good,” being part of an “elite” Church group, etc.   Merton said, for example, that people were taught to act humble and so they would be humble…nothing there about any deep transformation!  Everyone knows that “monastic image,” the monk with that hood up! “Progressive” monasticism, on the other hand, was becoming a mixed bag of some necessary changes, and also an embrace of modernity in all its superficiality…a kind of smogasbord of stuff to keep you “happy,” “satisfied.”   It seemed to ignore the real awakening a person was experiencing but unable to interpret it correctly.  A novice once told Merton, “I came here for personal fulfillment; why all this talk of trials?”  But for a Christian contemplative the path of deep prayer, the path of true transformation,  follows the pattern of the Paschal Mystery.  There is no Easter without Good Friday.   Merton: 

“Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding. For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial ‘doubt.’ This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious ‘faith’ of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion. This false ‘faith’ which is what we often live by and which we even come to confuse with our ‘religion’ is subjected to inexorable questioning… Hence, it is clear that genuine contemplation is incompatible with complacency and with smug acceptance of prejudiced opinions. It is not mere passive acquiescence in the status quo, as some would like to believe – for this would reduce it to the level of spiritual anesthesia.” 

There is a profound paradox in this journey.  The more we “awaken,” the more we become aware of our “exile” from God, our alienation from our inmost self, our “blind wanderings in the region of unlikeness” as Merton put it.  But at a certain point we discover ourselves as the “prodigal child” in that Gospel parable.  and we undertake a “homecoming journey” to “our Father’s House,” our deep heart, our true self, where we find all mercy and all compassion, our meaning, our true hope, our true faith, the only real peace, and the secret of          our real identity hidden in Christ.  In the beginning there has to be a division.  There has to be a seeker as well as something that he/she is seeking (cf. Rule of St. Benedict on the entering monk).  But then comes a time when that division is no longer there.  You do not deny that you have an ordinary everyday ego, but now you know what it is.

In conclusion we have an excerpt from another remarkable piece by Merton:  Day of a Stranger.  Some South American literary journal sent a request to Merton that he write down how he spends his time now that he was a hermit.  He sent them this piece, which eventually got reprinted in the Hudson Review and is available here:  https://hudsonreview.com/1967/07/day-of-a-stranger/

Read the whole thing; In an indirect way it sheds light on what this whole contemplative vision is.  It is essential reading to better understand Merton’s teaching on prayer and monastic life and even also to truly understand the ancient teachings in modern clothes as it were.  Here is just an excerpt:

“This is not a hermitage—it is a house. (“Who was that hermitage I seen you with last night? . . .”) What I wear is pants. What I do is live. How I pray is breathe. Who said Zen? Wash out your mouth if you said Zen. If you see a meditation going by, shoot it. Who said “Love?” Love is in the movies. The spiritual life is something people worry about when they are so busy with something else they think they ought to be spiritual. Spiritual life is guilt. Up here in the woods is seen the New Testament: that is to say, the wind comes through the trees and you breathe it. Is it supposed to be clear? I am not inviting anybody to try it. Or suggesting that one day the message will come saying NOW. That is none of my business.

I am out of bed at two-fifteen in the morning, when the night is darkest and most silent. Perhaps this is due to some ailment or other. I find myself in the primordial lostness of night, solitude, forest, peace, a mind awake in the dark, looking for a light, not totally reconciled to being out of bed. A light appears, and in the light an ikon. There is now in the large darkness a small room of radiance with psalms in it. The psalms grow up silently by themselves without effort like plants in this light which is favorable to them. The plants hold themselves up on stems which have a single consistency, that of mercy, or rather great mercy. Magna misericordia. In the formlessness of night and silence a word then pronounces itself: Mercy. It is surrounded by other words of lesser consequence: ‘destroy iniquity’ ‘Wash me’ ‘purify,’ ‘I know my iniquity.’ Peccavi. Concepts without interest in the world of business, war, politics, culture, etc. Concepts also often without serious interest to ecclesiastics.  Other words: Blood. Guile. Anger. The way that is not good. The way of blood, guile, anger, war.

Out there the hills in the dark lie southward. The way over the hills is blood, guile, dark, anger, death: Selma, Birmingham, Mississippi. Nearer than these, the atomic city, from which each day a freight car of fissionable material is brought to be laid carefully beside the gold in the underground vault which is at the heart of this nation.

‘Their mouth is the opening of the grave; their tongues are set in motion by lies; their heart is void.’

Blood, lies, fire, hate, the opening of the grave, void. Mercy, great mercy.”

Continuing our reflections on the talks Merton gave at the Redwoods monastery in 1968……   

Let me begin in another place and another time and with a personal account.  The time is 1981; the place is the Graduate Theological Union, and I have been sent by my monastic community to study some theology at one of the Catholic schools that make up the GTU.  What is also there is some kind of institute of spirituality which mainly serves Catholic active religious who are on a sabbatical.  It is a very liberal place both theologically and spiritually.  Most of the religious there are “survivors” of the renewal decade before, and are now in a position like this as characterized by Merton in one of the talks:

“It’s very disconcerting, because we have been pushing and pushing on the door, and all of a sudden, the door has burst open and we’re all falling over each other; and find there’s a stairway on the other side, and we’re all rolling down it.  And after all this tremendous pushing, to suddenly break through this door and find ourselves falling is quite an experience.  Because anything is possible now.  If you keep within reason, you can do anything you want, provided it’s humanly reasonable.  Still, people are pushing like mad.  They’ll take the most impossible and most unlikely thing and push on that, because they think they have to push…..  And suddenly, when everything is possible, we realize that we don’t really know what we wanted to do….  So, you get the rather disconcerting phenomenon of all these little contemplative experiments being started and then evaporating….  Started by kids who have gone through a traumatic experience of wanting a real contemplative  life and somebody says, ‘All right, here it is.  You know what you want, go ahead and do it.’  And they don’t know what they want.  And it evaporates.  They buy a farm….they sit around and suddenly realize that they’ve either got to do it the old way—which of course they absolutely refuse to do—or you’ve got to have a  better way of your own, which they don’t have.  So then comes the meetings and the dialogues and then it becomes an interminable yak session….  You have to realize that perhaps you already do know what you want, and maybe the new structures aren’t that necessary.”

Of course Merton is talking to and about contemplative religious, monks and nuns.  But an analogous dynamic was happening with active religious also.  The people at this institute were active religious from all over the world, and they were seeking a new vision of their vocation and new ways of going about it.  And they were eager to reject anything that smacked of “old school”….in many ways they were simply rejecting the painful experiences of regressive, sclerotic, institution-centered religious life.  Getting back to my story….one day a middle-aged nun came up to me and said, “I heard you were a monk who lives in silence and solitude.”  I smiled, “Well, that’s a reasonable approximation to my life.”  Then her face changed expression, a kind of combo of pity for me and even anger, and she said, “Really, what kind of image of God do you have that you want to live like that?”  Being a relatively young and immature monk, my jaw dropped and I mumbled something….I was simply stunned and had no reply to her challenge.  Today I might venture a statement like, “Sister, whatever image of God I might have or whatever image of God you might have, both are equally idols, and you know what we have to do to idols.”  But that was another time….!  

Merton points out that in 1968 contemplative monasticism was less criticized by Marxists than by Catholics—he got a laugh on that remark (nowadays nobody seems to even care).  Merton mentions that almost every issue of the National Catholic Reporter had a critical article about “monks in their monasteries.”  Of course, as Merton well recognized, there was plenty to criticize!  But liberal active religious had their own problems, and at root it was the same as for the monks: modern consciousness. which denied the need for any notion of God or any Transcendent Reality.   The human reality was to be envisioned, evaluated, and dealt with in a totally secular way. And this had been unfolding for centuries. One response to this, both Protestant and Catholic, was radical theologies and spiritualities that took up the challenge and said, Go ahead and plunge into this secularism and bring no religion into it but act “Christlike.”  The “God is dead” movement….. and others less radical.  But the modern consciousness distorts the modern religious consciousness so that there is “no room in the inn” for deep prayer to be considered important or even valid and the same goes for the monastic reality.  It is one thing to be talking about contemplation when the Divine Reality is understood as the backdrop and ground of all that is and all that happens.  It’s quite another thing when only science and rationalism and empiricism is allowed in explaining the universe and the human person and all social life simply is the secular pursuit of secular ends with religion as a kind of optional “add-on.”    And you can see then that “renewal,”  becomes problematic. My write-up on this is brief and  an oversimplification of a complex and vast topic, but Merton is quite good in exploring this problem both in these conferences and in several of his writings….better than anybody else, I think,  and trying to speak up for an authentic contemplative life.

The other response to the challenges presented by modern consciousness can be called “conservative” but that’s just a label.  It was a withdrawal in a profound and comprehensive way(not just for an atmosphere of silence and solitude) so that the monk was seen as separate from his/her fellow human beings.  What it led to is a distortion of what a “life of prayer” is and an ossification and institutionalizing of monastic life in a rigid structure that was there to make the institution look “special,” “holy,” “elite,” etc., etc.  Renewal here meant patching up the “fortress of holiness” that monastic life had become.  A life that was filled with illusions and delusions; certainly to live an authentic life of prayer and grow in your life in God in that environment….well, that could take a truly heroic effort!  And Merton is not afraid to talk about that.

Merton was emphatically not one to run away from the modern consciousness or the challenges to monastic life and contemplative spirituality that it brought  Yes, he had scathing criticisms of modern life; but he also found there voices and visions that helped to diagnose the ailments of modern humanity in a new and experiential language, and found key insights to better understand what the modern person brings, wounded as he/she is, to the “gate” of a contemplative life as they come seeking something deeper than what society offers.  (And these modern voices were themselves already questioning social existence in this milieu, e.g. Fromm, Freud, etc— e.g., Merton recommends to his monastic audience to read Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents).  And so Merton sees the contemplative not as an “escapee” from modernity(which would be illusory anyway), but he/she is to discover deep within themselves the unity that is intrinsic to their true identity which is in God  and of course totally unknown to that exterior ego identity which is all that secular modernity knows.  That process of discovery and uncovering can be called “contemplative prayer,” when this is rightly understood, and it is a way of life and vision, but also a path that is no-path, and few seem to walk it.  But it is in these depths that the true contemplative joins all his brothers and sisters in the “world” in an unspeakably profound way….but few seem to travel this no-path!

Merton’s exceptionally deep thoughts on this contemplative prayer require a profound engagement on our part. Can’t do that in a blog, but in the next posting we shall scratch the surface of such an effort and see what he can teach us.

Back in 1968 Thomas Merton made two long trips outside his monastery.  On both trips he made extended stops at the Trappistine community of nuns in northern California, the Redwoods Monastery.  Both times he gave a series of talks to a small gathering of religious men and women, active and contemplative.  The topic: renewal in depth.  The talks were recorded and finally published in 2024 in a book entitled Merton in California.  I read the book twice, and it has sparked a number of observations, insights, and comments….brought me back to my own concerns  for many years.

But first let us go back to that tumultuous era and recall our own mindset at that time:

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, sparking race riots in cities across the United States.  

Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles after winning the California Democratic primary.  

The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago was the site of violent clashes between police and anti-war protesters.  

The Glenville Shootout in Cleveland resulted in multiple deaths between Black militants and police, followed by days of rioting. 

The Tet Offensive began, a major series of attacks by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army that marked the first televised war. 

The My Lai Massacre, where hundreds of Vietnamese civilians were killed.  

The Republican National Convention nominated Richard Nixon for President.  Richard Nixon won the 1968 presidential election. 

The Civil Rights Act of 1968 was passed, a landmark piece of legislation aimed at prohibiting discrimination. 

Prague Spring: A brief period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia was ended by an invasion of Warsaw Pact troops in August.

Time magazine came out with an issue headlined “God is dead,” a lengthy article about a trendy group of Protestant theologians who practiced a new radical theology that few seemed to understand.

USS Pueblo incident: North Korea captured the U.S. Navy surveillance ship USS Pueblo, holding its crew for 11 months. 

Apollo 8: The crewed spacecraft Apollo 8 orbited the Moon for the first time on December 24, with its crew becoming the first humans to see the far side of the Moon and the Earth as a whole. 

Olympics Black Power salute: At the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, African-American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in a Black Power salute during the medal ceremony.

Merton died in a freak accident in December.

I graduated from college and had already visited the Carthusians and Gethsemani in Kentucky and felt completely lost….almost went to Canada.

I won’t compare that era to this one….not a wise or simple thing to do.  Each has had plenty of its own peculiar nightmares!  In any case, the buzz word among Catholics of that era was “renewal,” and  that was the topic of Merton’s talks at Redwoods:  renewal of monastic life and contemplative life in general.  At times the talks are deeply insightful, even profound, and at other times annoyingly superficial, hurriedly glossing over some real questions and complexities….but always illuminating some aspect of one’s spiritual journey. A digression:  Reza Aratesh, the Iranian Sufi psychologist whom Merton wrote about and with whom he corresponded and who helped him get a deeper understanding of the Sufi path, once visited Gethsemani after Merton’s death.  He got to listen to some recordings of Merton’s talks to his novices/other monks about Sufism; and he was disappointed and even upset….to him the talks seemed flip, superficial, even misleading.  When Merton talked he was prone to that; he moved fast over a lot of material and wanting to communicate as much as possible to people to whom this material was unfamiliar.   Analogy:  A trip where you “Do Europe in 10 Days”!  Example:  I read his A Course in Christian Mysticism, a transcription of his conferences to his novices in the early 1960s.  To me this was barely readable, and I don’t plan ever to go back to this work.  But when he is focused on a topic and writing with his acute reflection, it’s a very different matter.  His long essay, “The Philosophy of Solitude,” I can never leave, it illumines my heart so much! (And of course his essays on Zen and contemplative prayer).   In these Redwoods talks you find a bit of both

 I was struck by his use of the other major religious traditions in shedding light on Catholic contemplative renewal….today that kind of language would not be unusual but back in 1968 it definitely was “different.”  And there are some surprises here:  he spends more time talking about India and Hinduism than about Buddhism/Zen.  The latter he was very conversant about; the former not so much…and it shows.  He seems to have little or no interest in Advaita Vedanta as such but spends considerable time talking about the various kinds of yogas and the lessons we can learn from them.  He is mainly attracted by the pluralism and diversity of Hinduism.  Another puzzler: he does not seem at all intrigued or fascinated by the sannyasi reality.  And finally:  remember, this is 1968….he shows awareness of the existence of Shantivanam, and substantial writings by Monchanin and Abhishiktananda have been published and he seems aware of them, but he almost totally ignores Abhishiktananda and spends considerable praise on Monchanin.  This partially explains that when he does get to India he doesn’t seem to seek out Abhishiktananda. While there he shows little interest in Hinduism but absolute fascination with Tibetan Buddhism.  Interesting! 

 Lets get back to this renewal thing—the real theme of all these conferences. Once more lets recall it’s 1968 and as far as Catholic renewal is concerned the cat is out the bag and the horse is out  of the barn….it’s really on and affecting every aspect and every segment of Church life, lay, clerical, religious, monastic.  There is a lot of excitement, confusion, and expectation….and all three at the same time!  In a bit of oversimplification we could say there were two distinct wings to this renewal: one, conservative; the other, liberal.  The former saw renewal as a kind of dusting off the old structures, airing out a stale room; the latter saw renewal as almost a kind of demolition job….and these folks looked upon the conservatives as “polishing furniture on the Titanic” when they should be looking for a lifeboat!  So Merton was talking about renewal in this context.  But he was not about to fall for these easy categories and their unreal worldviews.  Merton was aiming for the heart of it all, asking what is the real meaning of renewal . For monks this is intimately connected with the reality of prayer (and we will get into that much more in another posting); and for Merton there is absolutely no other justification for the monastic life except this reality of prayer—rightly understood.  It is commonly called “the contemplative way,” and it also has a significant role for active religious in their renewal.  For Merton, the institution is there for that reason, not the other way round. For the monk, renewal should center on making all structures and all practices facilitate the contemplative life.  Very simple: what helps, you keep; what doesn’t, you modify or discard.  Also, for Merton, renewal is about taking seriously the condition and mindset of the modern person who approaches the contemplative way.  Easy to get lost here, even get badly hurt. 

Given all that, you can sense the frustration and anxiety in Merton about how this renewal will develop.  So many monks and nuns have a poor grasp on what is central to their vocation.  They are vulnerable to be stampeded into making all kinds of external, superficial changes in order to be “relevant,” in order to attract “modern young people,” in order not to lose people already there…..and the great exodus has already begun by 1968.  Merton mentions in passing how a group of monks at his monastery were discussing the possibility of a handball court.  There’s committees of monks discussing all kinds of possibilities; endless talking and everything seems up for grabs in a whim.  But there’s also the other group for whom even superficial customs or cherished practices are sacred even though they are quite clearly toxic to the contemplative way.  You can almost hear the sarcasm in Merton’s voice when he mentions how the “chapter of faults” surely enhanced fraternal charity!  There is a kind of glorification of the institution and its image (and we’ll get back to this in a deeper way when we get to contemplative prayer  in Part II), and for too many monks and nuns a healthy development of a deep life necessitates running an obstacle course which not many can manage.   Merton’s point is that the sclerotic nature of monasticism as an institution had to be shaken up, but always the goal and the point of it all was the deep contemplative life….not simply ‘being modern.”

In any case, if there was hope that a “renewed” monastic/religious life would be more attractive to young people, that proved to be not quite so.   The numbers for all Catholic religious life have taken a staggering decline, both active and contemplative.  Consider:  Trappist monks in the U.S. in 1968, about 700; Merton’s own monastery of Gethsemani, about 160.  Today Trappists in the U.S. number about 200; Gethsemani, about 40.  The numbers are not  any better in the very active, very modern Jesuits:  combined U.S. and Canada the Jesuits numbered abound 8000 in 1968; today, about 2000.  And all these numbers are declining slowly even more.  No kind of renewal, good or bad, could forestall this; the reasons for this decline are deep and complex….and I will touch on this in Part II.

I think Catholic monasticism (western) really missed an opportunity in this age of renewal.  The focus was on the “charism of the founder” for each congregation.  There was some real authentic developments from that dynamic, but it still inevitably leads to institutional narrow-mindedness and institutional egotism.  Instead, all the monastic congregations should have banded together and worked to recover the deep universal monastic charism which could then be expressed in a pluralism and diversity that flows with life and growth in the Spirit.  In other words there would only be monks….not members of this or that congregation….something like the phenomenon on Mt. Athos.  In any case, just a dream of mine……!

The future of monastic life as we have known it is doubtful.  However, monastic life in some form will always be there:  small, “off the beaten path” of what the world considers important, perhaps in some sense hidden, with no credentials except prayer and the Divine Presence.  Merton thought that was a real possibility, and I think he was truly right…..a lot to be said about this….perhaps later.

A dear friend of mine asked me this question:  what is a monk/contemplative person to do in times as these?  A good question….and with some urgency.  Also a very difficult question; there’s a lot packed inside it.  Simple “black-and-white” type of answers would only lead us into deeper blindness.  In fact this is the type of question in life that tends to answer itself if given time and a sincere heart.  But I will chip in with a few comments and observations that might point in the right direction.

I am reminded of the time I was studying theology in Berkeley back about 1983, and I was a member of the Catholic peace group, Pax Christi.   It was the high time of the “Reagan Revolution” and he seemed to be pushing things toward a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union….a lot of people were scared that this was the case.  It was also the time when the movie “Gandhi” came out   Some were inspired and motivated by the movie to “imitate” Gandhi….a group of Catholic activists in the Oakland area decided to undertake a total fast until the U.S. stopped its nuclear arms production.  That was about 15 people who looked very sincere and determined to starve themselves to death if necessary.  We in Pax Christi were alarmed about what might happen because we knew damn well that the folks in Washington were not going to pay any attention to such a gesture.  A big meeting was called at GTU….about 100-200 people showed up….we were to discuss what our position as Christians should be toward all this.  Before the meeting some Pax Christi leaders urged me to consult Michael Nagler, with whom I had had several talks.  Nagler was a professor of  classics at Cal, founder of the Peace Studies Program at Cal, and most importantly a true disciple of Gandhi and very well-versed in Gandhi’s teaching.  I asked him what Gandhi’s perspective would be on what these peace activists were doing.  He was very direct: “A tragic mistake.”  His point was that Gandhi carefully chose his actions and sought limited attainable goals and most importantly the protest did not seek “victory” over the “other” but his change of heart, to win him over.  In other words, Gandhi’s protests were rooted in a deep, spiritual wisdom without losing sight of the nitty-gritty of everyday life.  And the key word in all this is “wisdom.”  We are not talking about political savvy, or ability to manipulate people towards ends that you think are good, or just venting frustration and anger.  This wisdom comes from a deep sophianic  vision of life, seeing into one’s own  heart and seeing the wholeness of existence.  This led to his fundamental principle of life: satyagraha, non-violence.  Concretely, this can lead to unexpected gestures….example:  early  on in India Gandhi mobilized a national strike against the British rule.  When things started getting out of hand and some violence erupted, he suspended the strike going against all the wishes and inclinations of all the other Indian leaders.  After all, they said, we have the Brits scared now, they will relent, we will win.  Gandhi’s reply:  we want not a “victory” over them but to win them over…..we may not be ready for independence.  When the Brits leave we want them to  leave as friends not as defeated enemies. He shut down the movement for years; here is AI’s summary of all that:

 The movement, launched in 1920, was intended to be a non-violent campaign against British rule. It involved Indians boycotting British goods and institutions and resigning from official titles and services.

The campaign gained immense momentum, uniting a broad spectrum of Indian society and spreading political consciousness even in historically inactive regions. 

The Chauri Chaura Incident (February 1922)

The violence: On February 4, 1922, a mob of protesters at Chauri Chaura village clashed with police. The police opened fire on the crowd, which then retaliated by attacking and burning the police station, killing 22 policemen.

• Gandhi’s response: Devastated by the violence, which violated his core principle of satyagraha (non-violent resistance), Gandhi immediately called off the national movement.
• Reaction to the decision: The sudden suspension shocked and angered many Congress Party leaders, including Jawaharlal Nehru, who believed the movement was at its peak. However, Gandhi insisted that the people were not adequately trained for non-violence.

Now none of the above is meant to devalue the act of protest, nor does it say that protest is problematic in itself.  As Ezra Pound put it, “A man with a sensitive nose living in a sewer is bound to say something.”  Whenever we encounter something seriously wrong, an injustice, an evil…within the civic body…it is a necessary act and a spiritual act to say NO.  But our “NO” has to be grounded in a great YES.  It has to be a No based in truth and in compassion for all creatures.  And this truth is never “political” in the sense of Left vs. Right, Conservative vs. Liberal, this party or that party.  It is political in the sense that we are all members of the “polis,” that community of obligations and freedoms and relationships that allow all of us to flourish in a deeply human way.  And this NO is never some formula or some fixed pattern for all; it can be embodied in some very different ways.  Note some examples:

1. Rosa Parks.  When Rosa Parks refused to comply with Jim Crow segregation rules on a bus….and so started a whole movement of non-violent NO to segregation…..

2. An authentic sannyasi sitting in a Himalayan forest intoxicated with the Divine Presence……

3. Wendell Berry, poet, writer, farmer.  Berry was an excellent writer, but he lived a quiet life “off the beaten path.”  When the Vietnam war was raging he issued this statement:

“We have become blind to the alternatives to violence. This involves us in a sort of official madness, in which, while following what seems to be a perfect logic of self-defense and deterrence, we commit one absurdity after another: We seek to preserve peace by fighting a war, or to advance freedom by subsidizing dictatorships, or to ‘win the hearts and minds of the people’ by poisoning their crops and burning their villages and confining them in concentration camps; we seek to uphold the ‘truth’ of our cause with lies, or to answer conscientious dissent with threats and slurs and intimidations. … I have come to the realization that I can no longer imagine a war that I would believe to be either useful or necessary. I would be against any war.”

And then he went back to his small farm……

4. Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Buddhist monk, writer……

A beautiful, beautiful person, who had a long history of “protesting from the heart.”  About his teaching and his approach, I could not say it better than this short article:

https://www.stillwatermpc.org/dharma-topics/protesting-from-the-heart/

And I recall that remarkable silent march in LA  in 2005:

“On October 9, 2005 the Associated Press reported, “There was no cheering, no chanting and no sign waving. The march organized by Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh brought together 3,000 people to enjoy an unusual state in this city – silence. Activist mom Cindy Sheehan, who garnered national attention this summer with her anti-war vigil outside President Bush’s Crawford ranch, was among those who attended the event at MacArthur Park west of downtown Los Angeles. She and Hanh embraced before the march began, but Hanh was not shy about expressing his view of Sheehan’s tactics. ‘I don’t think shouting angrily at government can help us end the war,’ he said. ‘When we are able to change our own thinking, the government will have to change.’ Hanh later told the audience: ‘We don’t think shouting in anger can help. If you make people angry and fearful, then you cannot reduce violence and fear. When you speak to people, you should speak to them in a language they can understand. By doing that, we can turn our enemies into our friends.'”

And there are so many other beautiful examples…..

My friend also introduced a very troubling issue….he laments that only about 150 people turned out for a protest against the actions of President Trump….and this  in a deeply “Blue” area.  I am not going to speculate about this particular situation, but I want to step back and take a look at the bigger picture and this looks very bleak.  (And also where are all the “protesters” of what is happening in Gaza this past year even though we as a country are deeply, deeply implicated?)

First of all, we are a democracy and “the people” have spoken.  Donald Trump was the people’s choice,  It doesn’t mean that you and I have to like this or passively accept it, but we do have to ask ourselves “why and how” did this happen?  To understand that we really need to see that President Trump, no matter how toxic his policies are and how harmful his actions are, is actually only the symptom of our deep problem as a culture, as a society, as an economy, as a nation, and which was manifest in our history long ago for those  with eyes to see it.  Chris Hedges has written to a certain extent about all this for the past few years, catching a glimpse of “the problem” as it were; but he has been especially acute in pointing out how both political parties, the Republicans AND the Democrats have had a big hand through our history  in bringing us to where we are now, spiraling downward and deeper into our own incoherence…..just like ancient Rome…..we can neither stand what ails us, nor its cure….elections provide few real choices….choosing the lesser of two evils decade after decade after decade eviscerates political vision for real change and citizens are left with propaganda, lies, empty slogans like “hope and change,”….”make America great again,” etc.  Our politicians, all of them, are too often like magicians….seemingly doing something with one hand while doing something different with the other.  They are certainly not like that Desert Father (or Gandhi) who said, “I am the same outside as I am inside.”  You are not going to have collective transparency until you have a little bit of that.

I am not going to go into all that here.  Suffice it to say that all we can do is say our NO in the best way we can, grounded in truth and in compassion for all creatures.  Speaking of which, we have trashed our natural world, our home, for centuries now; and ameliorations in recent decades have been a pittance, more like a gesture to fool ourselves that no radical change is needed.  Well, now the mask is off, and it’s “drill, baby, drill,” etc.   I will let Wendell Berry have the  last say on all this:

“Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”

When Mother Nature says NO……

Meanwhile I will follow Berry’s advice from one of his poems:  “go, practice resurrection.”  And so I will try to learn how to sincerely say to Donald Trump, “Namaste.”

Blaise Pascal

In the 17^th century Blaise Pascal, a brilliant French philosopher and mathematician and an intense spiritual seeker, kept a kind of “thought diary” In which he wrote down his various reflections in fragmentary form.  After his death it was published under the French title, Pensees, and ever since it has become a classic of the Western Tradition.  Here’s a few of his “thoughts”:

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”

“If we submit everything to reason our religion will be left with nothing mysterious or supernatural. If we offend the principles of reason our religion will be absurd and ridiculous . . . There are two equally dangerous extremes: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason.”

“Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light is throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.”

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

This last statement sounds a bit flip but actually it carries a very deep insight which is also quite universal….I mean you will catch the same sentiment among the Sufis, Zen folk, Desert Fathers, etc.  We will return to this later in a different and more obvious context.

Poor Pascal, as brilliant as he was, and so sincere and intense in his religious journey, he nevertheless became tainted with Jansenism, a real spiritual malady that spread through 17^th century French religious culture (especially Catholicism, but it did also resemble some tenets of the Protestant Reformation).  Jansenism’s vision of mankind was one of total corruption, and all human beings were predestined either for salvation or damnation.  What Pascal illustrates is that no matter how keen one’s intellectual acuity is (and he was a true genius), that is no guarantee of spiritual/religious clarity.  That’s a whole other ballgame as they say!  Perhaps something to think about.

Cormac McCarthy

Novelist, consummate storyteller, master of English prose….  At one point in my life  I was deeply enticed by his novels.  The writing was so engrossing, even hypnotic….but finally I could not follow his extremely bleak vision of life and his portrayal of life as completely opaque to any meaning.  However, there are those moments of remarkable luminosity.  A small example of that is this excerpt from one of his novels, The Crossing:  the setting is in Mexico about 70 years ago, and a grizzly old man is talking to a young American who has lost his family ranch and who has rode his horse into old Mexico to perhaps find a sense of his old way of life:

“Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place. And that is what was to be found here. The corrido. The tale. And like all corridos it ultimately told one story only, for there is only one to tell.”

There is a deep truth hidden here.  Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn , The Great American Novel begins like this:

“You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly – Tom’s Aunt Polly , she is – and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.”

 Robert Bellah, the sociologist, and Alasdair MacIntyre, the moral philosopher, have both pointed out that our individual lives are a narrative set within a larger story. WHO Huck is, who this person is, is set within this story and you really don’t know him without  knowing the  whole story.   In other words, we are not these separate “marbles” just rubbing against each other randomly in this bucket we call “our world.”  Our life is a story set unfolding within a great story….and this implies a lot.  No wonder modern human beings are strangely drawn into a vacuity of meaning, and either embrace the resultant nihilism or anesthetize themselves into spiritual numbness through the varied “drugs” that modern life provides.  MacIntyre said that before you can decide, “What is the right thing to do?  What is the good thing to do in any situation?” “What should I do?” you have to ask, “What story is my life a part of?”  Who you are and a sense of who you are and what that means and what are your values emerge as you answer this question, either implicitly or explicitly. (Huck Finn, in his own way, does that.)  In this context one could say that Jesus radically changes the narrative in which our life is embedded.  Something to think about here.

Gandhi

In reading “Not Even Wrong,” a science blog by mathematician Peter Woit who teaches at Columbia….a blog  that I particularly like, I found this troubling quote:

“Update: The latest opinion polling of the Israeli public shows very strong support for ethnic cleansing and genocide. Support for expelling all Palestinians from Gaza at is at 82% (above 90% among the religious), for expelling all Arab citizens of Israel is at 56%. Support for killing all the inhabitants of a conquered city (e.g. Gaza or the West Bank) is at 47% (60% or so among the religious). No polling numbers on what fraction of Israeli citizens want their Arab citizen neighbors killed.”

These numbers are from the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz.  This gives us one glimpse, but just one, into the nightmare of that situation.  And then there is the newer entry by Peter:

“At the moment though it seems to me important to just focus on a basic point of morality: an appalling genocide is going on in Gaza, and Columbia University’s response to this genocide is an all-out campaign to stop people from protesting it. This is completely disgraceful.

It’s difficult to get reliable information about what is happening in Gaza, partly because the Israelis have killed most journalists there (and are starving to death the few remaining ). All indications are that the Israeli government is pursuing a policy of destroying all homes and infrastructure there, to make sure the inhabitants driven out have nothing to return to. Civilians are being killed and starved with the goal of forcing them somehow to leave. Among the most reliable sources of information are the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, which have detailed stories,,,, explaining how starving people seeking food are being killed.

The New York Times has recently published a long article by an Israeli scholar considered a leading authority on genocide entitled I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It. that strongly makes the case that what is going on is genocide.”

And of course what Hamas has done is also outrageous and evil.  Both sides seem to think that vengeance for what the other has done, or just plain fear for what the other might do, justifies almost any kind of response.  Retaliation disguised as self-defense becomes an absolute law.

(There is a partial and eerie similarity to what happened here in the U.S. between Native Americans and white Europeans in the first four centuries after the whites arrival.  Michael Rogin, a political philosopher, once called the Palestinians the “Indians of  the Middle East.”  That was back in the 1970s…..)

 The degree of fear and hatred that each side has in that conflict for the other side is mind boggling in its ferocity.   This is the result of decades of one injustice piled on top of another, of so much fear and hatred that one cannot see any good whatsoever in the “other,” of neither side rising heroically above their compulsion for vengeance, of allowing only “an eye for an eye” as your guide.  It is an expression and a manifestation of what we mean when we say “hell.”   And this made me think of Gandhi and the equally hellish situation between Muslims and Hindus in India.  

In 1946, as India was about to get its freedom from British rule, the tensions between Hindus and Muslims exploded in uncontrollable riots.  Mobs and official forces engaged in rampant murder, beating people to death,  rape, looting, brutalizing women and children, etc.  Something like at least two million people were killed.  There is a scene toward the end of the movie about Gandhi, where Gandhi, nearing death ,  is engaged in an absolute fast to stop the rioting.  A bedraggled and desperate Hindu man comes in to see Gandhi:

Hindu man: ”Eat…EAT! I am going to hell, but I will not have your death on my soul! I’m going to Hell! I killed a Muslim child! I smashed his head against a wall.”

Gandhi: “Why?”

Hindu: “Because they killed my son! The Muslims killed my only son!”

Gandhi: “I know a way out of Hell. Find a child, a child whose mother and father were killed and raise him as your own. Only be sure that he is a Muslim and that you raise him as one.”

“I know a way out of hell.”  Indeed!  Neither side in this insane conflict  has any leader capable of saying that and of showing THE WAY.  Instead the people are being led deeper into hell, and the suffering has been unspeakable and will continue to be so.  And the spiritual darkness reflected in that poll will only increase.  Something to think about.  And something to think about  our own implication in all this….our own place in this hellacious history…..

Martin Buber

Buber has a very interesting take on the whole Genesis account of the creation of human beings and the so-called “original sin.”  Like most Christian theologians and biblical scholars, he does not see it as a story of something that happened in the past but rather as a profound mythological explication of the human condition.  Merton, in one of his talks to his novices and fellow monks at Gethsemani, picks up  on this, and it is obvious that it has tremendous significance for him and its applicability to monastic life and the deep Christian life.  Here is the Youtube link to this talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA7GZaAaCpA

It’s not a good copy so you have to be patient.  At first he jabbers about some stuff, but then he gets going:

 What was Adam’s original sin?  He wanted to do good!!  In a sense Adam broke the original wholeness of creation.   He wanted to see himself doing good, being good…and a reward is just around the corner!  What a remarkable insight!  As Merton points out there is a lot to unpack here.  Listen to Merton as he goes a long way into it….very important for the monastic life and the true spiritual life:

““If we make this life a consistent project in seeing ourselves doing good, we are in trouble.”

But there is even more.  And so true how universal this insight is….Zen, for example is ruthless in deconstructing this self that wants to see itself enlightened.  In light of this I thought of that Gospel episode where someone addresses Jesus as “Good Teacher…..”  And Jesus’ response is, “Why do you call me good?  Only God is good.” (Mark 10:18)  Interesting echoes of Genesis.

Vocation

No Exit

I borrow this expression from the title of an intriguing  French play by Jean Paul Sartre.  But Mark Twain will be our guide for now….more precisely again that great American  novel, Huckleberry Finn.  There are several “escape themes” in the novel.  First of all,  Huck is an independent youngster who is very marginal to civilization and its values.  Aunt Polly tries to “sivilize” him, but that turns out to be like the proverbial square peg and round hole….ain’t gonna work!  Huck runs away and in doing so he encounters another “escapee,” a runaway slave by the name of Jim.  They join together on a raft floating down the Mississippi, a kind of community of escapees!  Huck may be marginal to civilized society, but his moral views have been shaped by that society; and so he is tempted to turn Jim in because he doesn’t want to do something illegal, “wrong,” helping a slave run away is condemned by his society.  But his young, naïve heart has a different sense about all this.  He helps Jim even If it means “going to hell” for doing this.  Here is the critical excerpt:

“It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they? It warn’t no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from ME, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting ON to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth SAY I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger’s owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie–I found that out.
So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn’t know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I’ll go and write the letter–and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:
Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send.

HUCK FINN.

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking–thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

‘All right, then, I’ll GO to hell’–and tore it up.”

Think about this!!  Where is the “hell” in this picture and is there a “way” out of it…..and has Huck found the way….or is there “no exit” for him (and us)?

The ”second escape” is their journey on the raft. They see it as a journey to each his own freedom.   But here is the tragic, cruel irony: they are not heading north toward “freedom,” but farther south….they are drifting down the Mississippi from a border state, Missouri, to the fully slave states of the South.  No exit for both of them. Huck witnesses the chaos, the corruption, the degradation of human sociability as he moves down the heart of American society on the Mississippi, the Great Highway of 19^th century America.  

(Interesting to compare/contrast this with Conrad’s very serious, very heavy novel, Heart of Darkness, another journey down another river and with one eye on the British Empire.  In any case, Jim does get his freedom because his owner freed him in her will……but is this really any kind of “escape” into anything like real free humanity in a free society?  About Huck….well, look below……)

Finally, the “third escape” appears in the last lines of the novel, Huck speaking:

“But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” 

Note:  “the Territory” is the West, Indian country, the wilderness, etc.  This represented a kind of symbol and reality of a kind of freedom for white Americans….a superficial freedom to be sure but one which could open up into something deeper.  But Huck had witnessed not only the boyish frustrations of civil limitations but the very rot at the core of civilization….and really there is “no exit” from that in “the Territory.”

Every major spiritual tradition will tell you that you will ALWAYS run into No Exit until you go through the heart of your heart which also always has external repercussions as Gandhi well  illustrates in “I know a way out of hell.”

One day the Buddha was asked: “How do we escape the heat of the summer’s day?”

And the Buddha answered, “Why not leap into a blazing furnace!”

Think about it.

Merton’s Hagia Sophia

I am sitting by a campfire at a remote campsite in the Sierras, Tibetan prayer flags flapping in the breeze, sending prayers for all creatures….

I am thinking about Thomas Merton at the Redwoods Monastery for a small group conference in 1968.   He is standing under a  redwood tree in the forest, listening to the soft rain.   Another monk approaches him….Merton tells him, “Here is where everything connects,”  Indeed.

I am thinking of Merton’s “Hagia Sophia,” a prose poem written about 1960 that may very well be his finest and deepest poetic reflection.  It reveals a profound discovery and awareness of the real “feminine” as a manifestation of Divine Wisdom at the depths of all reality. And it is this Sophia which is the root connectedness of all being that flows from the Mystery of the Ultimate Reality.

There is too much in this poem to go into at this time, but here are some excerpts:

“There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden whole-ness.
This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom,
the Mother of all,
Natura naturans.
There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in word-
less gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming me tenderly, saluting me with indescribable humility.
This is at once my own being, my own nature, and the Gift of my  Creator’s Thought and Art within me, speaking as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister, Wisdom.”

And:

“O blessed, silent one, who speaks everywhere!

Amen!