Second Tuesday Of Advent 2024-Thomas Merton

The Advent mystery is the beginning of the end of all in us that is not yet Christ.

--Thomas Merton

Something from a then-frequent reader:

Almost from the time of his entry in 1941 into the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (the Trappists) at the Monastery of Gethsemani, in Kentucky, Merton was obsessed with retreat from "the World," and from about 1952 onward he pressed for permission, heretofore unknown in the Order, to become a hermit with only limited contact with the monastic community; instead, in 1955 he was appointed Master of Novices, a position he held for the next nine years.

Merton, who has been described as "never having a thought he didn't write down," tended during this time to use the texts of his regular sessions within the novitiate as the basis for his later literary output, and it’s important to note that the temper of both his Introduction to as well as his selection from the writings of the Desert Fathers very probably had their basis in his sessions with his novices.

Wisdom of the Desert was published in 1960; in December of that year he was finally granted limited permission to reside in a small building on the monastery grounds, but was still required to sleep in the monastery and to participate in the activities of the community, including remaining Master of Novices. It wasn’t until 1964, just four years before his untimely death, that he was relieved of his position as novice master and permitted to remain exclusively in his hermitage.

From the fall of 1966 until early 1968, he had a remarkable exchange of correspondence (At Home in the World: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Rosemary Radford Reuther, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, N.Y. 1995). Reuther is a Catholic feminist theologian, then with a freshly minted Ph.D. In this exchange he attempted (in my view, ultimately unsuccessfully) to defend monastic solitude – the retreat from “the World” - as a necessary and viable alternative to active response to the challenges of contemporary secular society.

In her Introduction, written almost 30 years after the letters, Reuther says,

What I was looking for in initiating this conversation was neither a confessor, nor to be his confessor, but a genuine Catholic intellectual peer, one who would treat me as a peer, and with whom I could be ruthlessly honest about my own questions of intellectual and existential integrity. I was trying to test in this correspondence what was the crucial issue, for me, at that time: whether it was, in fact, actually possible to be a Roman Catholic and a person of integrity…. Could Catholics speak the truth and be Catholics? That Christians err, and even create monstrous idolatries, was in itself not scandalous to me. That would be only human. What was scandalous and insupportable was to be unable to admit error, to be incapable of repentance because you cannot entertain the possibility that you might be wrong. Worse still, to make such incapacity for self-questioning a dogma! That for me was the crux of the Catholic dilemma. [pp. xvi ff.]

Merton’s early response was to say,

“I do wonder at times if the Church is real at all. I believe it, you know. But I wonder if I am nuts to do so. Am I part of a great big hoax? I don’t explain myself as well as I would like to: there is a real sense of and confidence in an underlying reality, the presence of Christ in the world which I don’t doubt for an instant. But is that presence where we are all saying it is? We are all pointing (in various directions), and my dreadful feeling is that we are all pointing wrong. Could you point someplace for me, maybe? Thanks, and I am sorry to bother you. I have to write a book on monasticism, and I wonder if I can make it relevant – or may any sense with it at all. (I have no problem with my vocation.)[pp.17-18]

Never one to shirk a challenge, Reuther replied,
"You say you have no trouble with your vocation, but, if that is really true, maybe you should be having some trouble with your vocation. I love the monastic life dearly (I am a Third Order Benedictine) but today it is no longer the eschatological sign and witness in the church. For those who wish to be at the “kingdom” frontier of history, it is the steaming ghetto of the big city, not the countryside that is the place of the radical overcoming of this world, the place where one renews creation, disposes of oneself and does hand to hand combat with the demons. I don’t see how anyone who is tuck in the old moribund (once eschatological) structures and is at the same time alive to the times cannot be having some trouble with his vocation. But perhaps for you more important: more reading and thinking about Word and Church will not help. I think you will have to find some new way of having Word and Church happening for you….” [p.20]

Merton spends the rest of his time in this correspondence trying to explain his attitude toward his own solitude, and Reuther keeps shooting down his arguments. Finally, as the conversation begins to wind down, he writes,

"I don’t think I am rationalizing or evading when I say I think I owe it to you to pursue my own way and stand on my own in this sort of marginal and lost position I have. I am sometimes terribly hit by its meaning which is something I just cannot explain, because it is something you are not supposed to explain and must get along without explaining.” [p.62]

A rapprochement of sorts is reached in a concluding exchange. In December, 1967 Reuther writes,

"Dear Brother: You are really a shocking and dissolute fellow. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that the one thing a good son of the church never, never does, especially in ecclesiastical assemblies, is to state the bald and unregenerate truth? Surely someone must must have pointed this elementary fact out to you sometime during your novitiate.

She then quotes a fragment of a friend’s poem, applicable, she says, to Merton:

I suppose that with such views I shall be
left quite alone
To mumble plain truths like a dog
mumbling a bone… [pp.94-95]

Merton responds, 'Dear Rosemary: Ah, yes, I have become very wicked. This is due in great part to my hanging around with these women theologians. What a downfall. Let others be warned in time. Young priests can never be too careful. Tsk. Tsk.' [p. 96]

On December 10, 1968, at a conference of Asian monastic orders in Bombay, Merton finished his morning presentation with these words:

'I will conclude on that note. I believe the plan is to have all the questions for this morning’s lectures this evening at the panel. So I will disappear.'

"So he went to his room, and while taking a shower, was accidentally electrocuted."

December 10 marks the day of Merton's death. 

MERTON'S most important experience in his whole Asian trip came at Polonnaruwa. He went to visit the giant Buddhas and took a series of superb photographs of them.

I am able to approach the Buddhas barefoot and undisturbed, my feet in wet grass, wet sand. The silence of the extraordinary faces. The great smiles. Huge and yet subtle. Filled with every possibility, questioning nothing, knowing everything, rejecting nothing, the peace not of emotional refutation. . . that has seen through every question without trying to discredit anyone or anything-without refutation-without establishing some other argument. For the doctrinaire, the mind that needs well-established positions, such peace, such silence, can be frightening. I was knocked over with a rush of relief and thankfulness at the obvious clarity of the figures. . . . Looking at these figures I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious. . . . I don't know when in my life I have ever had such a sense of beauty and spiritual validity running together in one aesthetic illumination. Surely, with Mahabalipuram and Polonnaruwa my Asian pilgrimage has come clear and purified itself. I mean, I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for. I don't know what else remains but I have now seen and have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise.

That was on December 4. . . . [On December 10, after addressing the conference in Bangkok,] Merton had lunch and did disappear to his room, commenting to a colleague on the way about how much he was looking forward to having a siesta. In a long letter later written by the delegates at the Conference to Dom Flavian what then occurred was expressed in the following words: "Not long after he retired a shout was heard by others in his cottage, but after a preliminary check they thought'they must have imagined the cry.

"He was found at the end of the meridian (afternoon rest) and when found was lying on the floor. He was on his back with the electric fan lying across his chest. The fan was still switched on, and there was a deep burn and some cuts on his right side and arm. The back of his head was also bleeding slightly."

Perhaps any death brings with it both a sense of surprise and a sense of its inevitability. There are always those, and there were many after Merton's death, who feel that it somehow "had to be like that." Merton had, from time to time, both spoken and written comments that suggested that his death might come early. Some of his friends commented on the extraordinary, almost Zen-like way that death had come to him. Fewer people than one might expect noted that he died on the same day as the great Protestant theologian Karl Barth, and it was a measure of the ecumenism in Louisville, which Merton had been instrumental in promoting, that Catholics and Protestants there united in a joint memorial service for both of them.

Many years before Naomi Burton had made the suggestion, humorously, that Merton was accident-prone. "I couldn't help noticing that it's your visitors who get locked out of the church, and your server who forgets things, and your vestments that get caught in the folding chair. . . . I find your incredible adventures with nature and with publishing extremely endearing." Perhaps Merton was accident-prone; perhaps, like many intellectuals, he tended to get lost in his thinking, and absentmindedly forgot about the dangers of touching electrical equipment with wet hands; perhaps the fan was merely faulty. Perhaps, however, he had finished his life six days before at Polonnaruwa and was called to the God he had loved and served so well.

--Monica Furlong

The sermon I gave [at the conference on monasticism the morning after Merton's death] was a moment of talkinga bout Merton's search for God.  When a monk enters a monastery, what is asked of him is "Are you truly seeking God?"  The question isn't "Have you found God?"  The question is "Is he seeking God?  Is his motivation highly involved in that search of who and what God is in relationship to us?"  It's not philosophical--its' existential.  And Merton, to me, was a great searcher.  He was constantly unhappy, as all great searchers are.  He was constantly ill at ease, he was constantly restless, as all searchers are--because that's part of the search.  And in that sense he was the perfect monk.  Contemplation isn't satisfaction--it's search.

--Rembert Weakland

I paid a brief visit to Abbey Gethsemani about 40 years ago, now.  When I'm seeking a quiet place in memory for meditation and prayer, I conjure up the grounds there.  Something about the enforced silence of the monks profoundly suffuses the place.  There was also the recognition that my wife and my friend's wife (all friends from high school) couldn't go in with us (her husband and I).  I felt a persistent tug between the monastic life and the life of the world in that short visit.  I've felt it ever since.

Charm with your stainlessness these winter nights,
Skies, and be perfect!
Fly vivider in the fiery dark, you quiet meteors,
And disappear.
You moon, be slow to go down,
This is your fill!

The four white roads make off in silence
Towards the four parts of the starry universe.
Time falls like manna at the corners of the wintry earth.
We have become more humble than the rocks,
More wakeful than the patient hills.

Charm with your stainlessness these nights in Advent, holy spheres,
While minds, as meek as beasts,
Stay close at home in the sweet hay;
And intellects are quieter than the flocks that feed by starlight.

Oh pour your darkness and your brightness over all our solemn valleys,
Your skies:  and travel like the gentle Virgin,
Towards the planets' stately setting,

O white moon full as quiet as Bethlehem!

--Thomas Merton