Thomas Merton
Tomas Merton died 40 years ago this past December 10. It was the process of reading Merton’s words that moved me towards monastic life over 20 years ago, and so I thought it would be profitable to mention that his books and audio tapes and CDs are all still available. Thomas Merton Books is a great place to locate all his books and audio files, including all the extant audio of his talks to novice monks while he was novice master at The Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where he lived his entire monastic life. If you don’t know the Merton story, I recommend it to you as a way to both get to know the most singular monastic voice of the 20th century, and also monasticism’s best explicator.
I hope you’re as moved by his life’s story and words as I have been.
I came across this journal entry of Thomas Merton written on March 2, 1966. It is from a compilation of Merton’s journalistic writings, titled The Intimate Merton, edited by Br. Patrick Hart and Jonathan Montaldo. It is so universal, as was so much of Merton’s writing, and thus so appropriate to our own time, a time of uncertainty, which causes us to wonder if we will survive, and to think. perhaps, that ours is a unique age. Every age has its uniqueness, but underneath it all things remain very much the same. As Merton says…
A flash of sanity: the momentary realization that there is no need to come to certain conclusions about persons, events, conflicts, trends, even trends toward evil and disaster, as if from day to day and even from moment to moment I had to know and declare (at least to myself) that this is so and so, this is good, this is bad. We are heading for a “new era” or we are heading for destruction. What do such judgments mean? Little or nothing. Things are as they are in an immense whole of which I am a part and which I cannot pretend to grasp. To say I grasp it is immediately to put myself in a false position, as if I were “outside” it. Whereas to be in it is to seek truth in my own life and actions, moving where movement is possible and keeping still when movement is unnecessary, realizing that things will continue to define themselves and that the judgments and mercies of God will clarify themselves and will be more clear to me if I am silent and attentive, obedient to His will, rather than constantly formulating statements in this age which is smothered in language, in meaningless and inconclusive debate in which, in the last analysis, nobody listens to anything except what agrees with his own prejudices.
I find this very reassuring. And I believe what Merton says here is true and full of insight for us and people of every age. We are living in a time of deep disquiet, but as Merton says this is the place we inhabit always, and any thought that we can corral this bewilderment with our with our craftily constructed declarations is foolishness, an evasion from reality. Why is this? I think at bottom it is because we are not in control and we struggle against admitting it. We don’t want to concede how little control we actually have. The latest reminder is the implosion of our global economic architecture. It’s all tumbling down around us, and the news is frightening. Merton reminds us that this is an opportunity to recall who we really are: children of God, and it would benefit us if we stop our frenetic activities trying to define everything and answer that which is beyond our answering, and rest in God, and that his “judgments and mercies… will clarify themselves and will be more clear to me if I am silent and attentive, obedient to His will…”
Take heart, things are the same from age to age, just the players change.
It’s been a year and a half… and I can hardly believe it.
My – I should say our, because this story is about both my wife, Carol, and me – life has been about personal adjustment and lately just plain old survival, which has left very little time for my writing on Monk? blog. We left our cabin on the Medomak River and moved into a Federal mansion as caretakers for the owners who were in Arizona where they had jobs so they could pay the mortgage on the mansion. It’s a long story, but the precis is the owners tried to make a go of running the mansion as a bed & breakfast, after pumping a great deal of money into its renovation. Unfortunately, their plan didn’t pan out, for a lot of reasons, not least of which was attempting to run the B&B by Jehova’s Witness decorum, which excluded them from Saturday work, as well as not allowing liquor, among other codes of conduct. Well, not everyone is a Jehova’s Witness. You get the picture. They had to close the place and get jobs, which for them was Arizona.
Enter Carol and I. Friends of ours who knew the owners, asked us if we’d be interested in caretaking the place, and we jumped at the opportunity to save money. And so we packed up on November of 2007 and moved into the mansion. We loved it, but it wasn’t easy. The owners had installed an outdoor wood-fired stove, which ate prodigious quantities of of the stuff. Someone had to feed the beast, which we dubbed The Green Monster (it is colored green, and we’re Red Sox fans… forget it if you don’t get it!) and that would be me, sometimes three times a day. It took 4′ logs whole! And last winter it never stopped snowing. Here is a picture of the wood pile. I replenished that pile twice in the course of the winter. Whew!
Food for The Beast
And that’s not the entire wood pile! Anyway, we lasted the winter, but almost didn’t survive the summer.
In August I was out mowing the absurd yard. I say absurd, because the yard shouldn’t be in grass at all, unless you own sheep. Here is a shot of the front yard…
The Yard
I had let a part of the property go to a meadow and it was beautiful, with a number of wildflowers blooming in succession, as can be seen as my lovely Carol walks amid the flowers here. I was out getting the property whipped into shape for a visit by the owners, when I was stung several times by yellow jackets nesting in the ground, and again by a bumble bee I disturbed. Long story short, I was rushed to the emergency room in an anaphylactic shock, complete with full body convulsions and eyes rolling to the back of my head. It was close, but the good folks a Miels Memorial Hospital in neighboring Damariscotta saved me. It’s good to be alive.
To cut to the quick, the owners returned to a rather unkempt yard, because I wasn’t able to get out there and finish the mowing, and they were none too happy. Carol and I were none too happy either with the way they treated us, unwilling to take into account the unintended effects of a few random angry bees. We immediately began looking for a house and found a lovely small ranch on 2 acres in Damariscotta, put an offer in and it was accepted. We moved in in September 2009, and here we are!
So as you can see, it’s been hectic. It’s my hope to get back to my musings on the monastic life in the 21st century and what it means, if anything, to us today. I continue to believe, as you might guess, it means something quite significant.
Good to be back… again!