Old Voice for New Times

Thomas Merton in his cinderblock
hermitage at the Cisterican Monastery
of Gethsemane, Kentucky

The Trappist monk Father Louis, or Thomas Merton as he is commonly known, died 45 years ago. One would think that now in these fast paced times, in  a period considered by some as 'post-institutional religion', he would be 'done and over'. He could just be a little remembered phenom; the writing hermit whose literary voice helped to usher eager Catholics into the long awaited reforms of the Second Vatican Council and invited them to plumb the spiritual depths of the God relationship so that the renewal could take root. Then he died too young, only age 53, victim of accidental electrocution in Thailand during his exceptional Asian journey.

 

But Thomas Merton is still speaking to us and it is the very technological blessings of these fast-paced times that is making him available to us in surprisingly intimate ways. He has spoken to me these days with the force of a therapeutic jolting, a seismic jolt out of dysfunctional malaise.

 

Seeking spiritual guidance and intellectual enrichment I let my eyes wander through our community collection of recorded courses and lectures now in CD format. Through the years I had listened to poor quality audio tapes of Merton's lectures to his Novices. He was Novice Master for 15 years. Before cassette tapes became available, reel to reel tapes of his talks were informally circulated among contemplatives and laity eager to share his wisdom. As I looked at our current collection I sought titles of things I had not previously heard.

 

All of Merton's literary output and his recorded lectures are held by the Merton Legacy Trust and the Merton Center of Bellarmine University. (A lesson to us all - he died so young but had the wisdom to prepare his Literary Will some years before.) Now the gifts of technology are serving to make every recorded word Merton uttered available to anyone who wants to hear them today. CDs are available from NowYouKnowMedia.

 

These days I have been listening to a series of lectures Merton recorded alone in the natural surroundings of his own hermitage. These rather spontaneous talks were intended for the Sisters of Loretto whose motherhouse was nearby. They requested that Merton record his responses to written questions submitted by them. His tapes (reel to reel) would then be shared among the members of the Loretto community as part of their preparation for a General Chapter in 1967, a Chapter which would deal with the call to renewal of religious life.

 

He speaks in such a relaxed manner, in a tone suggesting that he considers the sisters to be an audience of his peers with whom he can be frank and to whom he has no need to condescend. Indeed, it was very touching to hear at the end of one lecture, " I will pray for you. I love you."

 

Merton's words in these lectures were so relevant to his times but it is striking to me that they have so much relevance for the situation in which we find ourselves today. His words have been gift to me and so appropriate for our current time as the Church, under the significant leadership of Pope Francis, seems to be emerging from a long period of self-absorption; denial of its own grievous faults; and its failure to preserve the value and significance of its spiritual voice for all people.

 

And Merton is so real. There is no Pollyanna here. He calls a spade a spade; warns of the pitfalls; acknowledges his own weakness; and acknowledges the price to be paid in taking the higher road. But he urges always that we must remain rooted in Jesus Christ and seeking the freedom of the children of God.

 

Why not revisit Merton? Why not visit him for the first time?

Pure Attention:

A Form of Prayer

My friend of many years and now divinity student, Linda Miles, took one of my book recommendations to heart. After reading Waldron's "Thomas Merton: Master of Attention" she decided to use it with a small group at her church. She has given permission for reprint here of the quotations she used and the reflection questions offered. Perhaps you may find them stimulating.

REFLECTIONS FROM
Thomas Merton: Master of Attention
by Robert Waldron

Attention
(poem inspired by Simone Weil)

Lord,
Teach me to be attentive
To all your vestiges;
To the first light,
To the waking bird,
To the leaf’s rustle and to the rain’s drop,
To the scent of water and to the sky’s hue
And to the rise of the wind;
Lord,
Teach me to be so attentive that
I shall hear the first flakes of the snow’s fall.
Robert Waldron

The key to a Christian conception of studies is the realization that prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable of toward God. The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of the heart cannot make up for it. The highest part of the attention only makes contact with God, when prayer is intense and pure enough for such contact to be established; but the whole attention is turned toward God.
Simone Weil

How Merton had become a “spiritual master” ?

“Merton, of course, prayed in church while chanting the psalms, when attending and later celebrating Mass, and at set times in the day he meditated on biblical texts. But he also prayed while reading, studying, and writing, while sweeping and cleaning his hermitage, while watching the deer outside his door, while gazing upon the Kentucky hills or listening to the birds outside his window, while looking at a blazing fire in his hearth on cold winter days and nights.”(Waldron, p.3)

“Deep prayer is not an esoteric activity only for mystics and proficients: it is available to all of us if we would only pay attention.” (Waldron p. 7)

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1 How is prayer like attention?
2. Which experience is more dominant in your prayer, you paying attention to God or God paying attention to you?
3. How satisfied are you by your prayer and what might you change to make it more attentive?
4. How is attention to nature, art, study, or scripture like prayer for you?

“The Hawk” in The Sign of Jonas by Thomas Merton

“The eagle attacked a tree of starlings but before he was near them the whole cloud of them left the tree and avoided him and he came nowhere near them. Then he went away and they all alighted on the ground. They were there moving about and singing for about five minutes. Then, like lightening, it happened. I saw a scare go into the cloud of birds and they opened their wings and began to rise off the ground, and in that split second from behind the house and from over my roof, a hawk came down like a bullet and shot straight into the starlings just as the were getting off the ground. They rose into the air and there was a slight scuffle on the ground as the hawk got his talons into the one bird he had nailed…..”

“It was a terrible and yet a beautiful thing, that lightening flight, straight as an arrow, that killed the slower starling….The hawk, all alone, in the pasture, possessed his prey. He did not fly away with it like a thief. He stayed in the field like a king with the killed bird and nothing came near him. He took his time.”

“I tried to pray, afterward. But the hawk was eating the bird. And I thought of that flight, coming down like a bullet from the sky behind me and over my roof, the sure aim with which he hit this one bird, as though he had picked it out from a mile away…But in the end, I think the hawk is to be studied by saints and contemplatives because he does know his business. I wish I knew my business as well as he does his…”

“I wonder if my admiration for you gives me an affinity for you, artist. I wonder if there will ever be anything co-natural between us, between your flight and my heart stirring to serve Christ, as you, soldier, serve your nature. And God’s love a thousand times more terrible! Now I am going back to the attic and to the shovels and the broken window and the trains in the valley and the prayer of Jesus.”(p.274-275)

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. Is your prayer life like that of the eagle or the hawk? How so?
2. What did Merton see in the hawk and how did he connect it to prayer?
3. Recall a time of prayer that was especially focused for you. What factors contributed to your heightened attention?
4. How can you apply Merton’s spirituality of attention to your life?

Interesting Reading

Follow the Ecstasy -

Advice Not Just for

Contemplative Nuns

and Monks

My spiritual director recently recommended that I read a book now about twenty-five years old. It is a biographical work by John Howard Griffin, author of "Black Like Me", first published in 1961. It is the well-known record of his experiment living as a Black man in the United States in the 50s.

The book I am reading, Follow the Ecstasy - The Hermitage Years of Thomas Merton, was published in 1983. It is only one Thomas Merton & John Griffin part of an official full biography which Griffin was never able to complete. Merton's hermitage years began in 1963 when he was finally relieved of his position as Master of Novices and therefore able to live full-time in his small cinder block cabin on the grounds of Trappist Gethsemani Abbey outside of Louisville, Kentucky. For those who do not know Merton, he became famous when his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain was published in 1949 and became an immediate bestseller. He was only thirty-five years old and and a monk for just seven years.

Merton consistently sought the ambiance of solitude, believing it to be the most conducive to conversion, especially his own conversatio morem or the conversion of manners, one of the Trappist vows. This is a two-fold conversion; both a shift to charity in love for his brother monks in community and all humankind, as well as, the gradual achievement of total abandonment to the will of God. This conversion is marked by the lack of struggle in the face of what is, the realities of everyday life.

As I read Follow the Ecstasy, which covers the years 1963-66, I am also reading Merton's own journal of the period 1947 to 1952 entitled The Sign of Jonas. This record begins just before Merton's profession of solemn vows. I t is interesting to see how the desire for greater solitude grown from the believe that silence would be the greatest help in his spiritual growth was with him so early in his religious life. It took sixteen years for his desire to live alone in a hermitage to be fully realized, only five short years before his death.

In relation to myself, I am not living alone in a hermitage but in a contemplative monastic community which cultivates silence and reveres the solitude provided by ones cell, thus, it can be said, we live together alone. The way we live re-enforces the enclosure of the heart, the enclosure in which one gradually sheds so many things and very gradually acquires the abandonment to God's will which Merton experiences in the silence of his holy hermit residence. This is the self-abandonment, the shedding of ego gratification and determination in which can be born, by the grace of God, that incredible lightness of being which is the freedom of the children of God. As St. Romuald says in the first line of his simple rule for Camaldolese monks, "Sit in your cell and your cell will teach you everything."