cistercian TOPICS
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Armand
Veilleux MONK ON A JOURNEY Fare forward,
travellers, not escaping from the past Into different
lives, or into any future; You are
not the same people who left that station Or who
will arrive at any terminus. (T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, 111: 137-140) I have read only parts of Thomas Merton's indefatigable
writing, and none of the flow-not to say flood-of books, doctoral
dissertations, and papers on Merton. Therefore, what has been
his real impact on the Church and the world, I cannot say. What
1 do know is that he has had a real impact on me, and I simply
want to express, in these few fines, what his significance for
my own life has been. To use T. S. Eliot's imagery, 1 have greeted Merton at
different stations along his journey, reading one of his books
or articles every other year or so, from the time of my novitiate
to the time of his death. What fascinated me was to perceive in
his writings a monk on a spiritual journey, a man in a continual
process of growth, whose field of consciousness was always both
deepening and opening up to new horizons. It was refreshing to see the young romantic monk of
The Seven Storey Mountain and the serious and too self-assured
spiritual teacher of The Ascent to Truth learning to laugh at
himself in The Sign of Jonas, and being able to take good "cracks"
at his community, which he sincerely loved. The not very critical
historian of The Waters of Siloe was able, some years later to
bear with serenity some lucid and severe judgments on the institution
whose faithful member he remained unto the end. And reading The
Asian Journal, one encounters a Merton getting very close to the
"final integration", its description in the article
"A Monastic Therapy" having a definitely autobiographical
flavor. Thomas Merton studied and loved the Desert Fathers,
the Cistercian writers, and the great Christian mystics. He found
in them an inspiration for his life; but he did not transform
their teaching, into an ideology. Or rather, he learned from their
teaching without adopting their ideologies. From their inspiration,
he developed his own spiritual synthesis, into which he integrated
harmoniously not only insight from the great world religions,
but also his vividly felt awareness of the great social, political
and economic problems facing humankind today. He gradually developed
a tender compassion for the world for which his first writings
show a certain haughty commiseration. His life was not guided by an abstract image of
what a good monk should be or should do, or by any theory, but
rather by a constant attention to God's voice in his heart. Therefore,
when he became a hermit, for example, he did not copy any stereotype
of a hermit, and he kept on with his literary activities, his
voluminous correspondence and his great number of friends. He
did not intend to set an example of what a modem hermit should
be; he simply followed his own call, discerned within the framework
of monastic obedience. 1
admire also how he avoided the dangerous
pitfall of the successful spiritual author: the danger of becoming
a slave of the readers' expectations and of the image he had given
of himself in his first books. On the contrary, each one of Merton's
important books or articles seemed somehow to destroy at least
partially the Merton-image of the preceding one. Thus, many persons
who had admired the theoretician of the spiritual life of the
first books were embarrassed by his later interests in Zen or
in social issues. He was certainly sensitive to people's appreciation
and expectations, and he was also vulnerable to their criticisms,
but his own evolution was not dependent on them. He was free. Merton
did not elaborate a new system of spirituality. There is nothing
particularly new in the things he thought. My impression is that
he will remain known in history not so much by the things he wrote
as by what he was. His gift seems to have been the ability to
integrate into a unified personal experience not only the different
currents of tradition, but also the deep spiritual movements of
our time, and to share that experience in a unique manner. I
like to see his monastic life as a dance, a bit stiff at the beginning,
more and more free and gracious with the years. The early Merton
was a young dancer who had mastered the techniques of his art
and was eager to teach them to others, indulging somewhat in
being the type of "engineer of the soul" which he would
judge severely later. At the end, he does not teach, but he is
able to embrace every person from every horizon and carry them
away in the whirl-winds of a dance that could be more and more
daring, yet sure and peaceful, because the dancer was solidly
rooted in the Source of the Dance. Except
for the point, the still point, There would
be no dance, and there is only the dance. (T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, 1: 66-67) |
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