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.