Modern Spiritual Masters

Modern Spiritual Masters / FULL TEXT FOR PRESS / May 31, 2008 / Page iii / TITLE

Modern Spiritual Masters / FULL TEXT FOR PRESS / May 31, 2008 / Page ii / CARD PAGE

Also by Robert Ellsberg

All Saints: Daily Reections onSaints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time

The Saints Guide to Happiness

Blessed Among All Women

As Editor:

The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day: Selected Writings

Gandhi on Christianity

Fritz Eichenberg: Works of Mercy

Charles de Foucauld: Essential Writings

Flannery OConnor: Spiritual Writings

Carlo Carretto: Essential Writings

Thich Nhat Hanh: Essential Writings

Modern Spiritual Masters / FULL TEXT FOR PRESS / May 31, 2008 / Page iv / COPYRIGHT

Founded in 1970, Orbis Books endeavors to publish works that enlighten the mind,nourish the spirit, and challenge the conscience. The publishing arm of theMaryknollFathers and Brothers, Orbis seeks to explore the global dimensions of the Christianfaith and mission, to invite dialogue with diverse cultures and religious traditions,and to serve the cause of reconciliation and peace. The books published reect theviews of their authors and do not represent the ofcial position of the MaryknollSociety. To learn more about Maryknoll and Orbis Books, please visit our websiteat www.maryknoll.org.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Modern spiritual masters : writings on contemplation and compassion /edited by Robert Ellsberg.

p. cm. (Modern spiritual masters)ISBN 978-1-57075-788-41. Spiritual life. 2. Contemplation. 3. Compassion Religious

aspects. 4. Spiritual life Christianity. 5. Compassion Religiousaspects Christianity. I. Ellsberg, Robert, 1955-BL624.M632 2008204 dc22

2008019681

Modern Spiritual Masters / FULL TEXT FOR PRESS / May 31, 2008 / Page 5

O N E

THOMAS MERTONContemplation and Compassion

In The Seven Storey Mountain, the famous autobiography he wrote inhis early years as a Trappist monk, Thomas Merton told a story byturns funny and sadof his search for his true identity and home, begin-ning with his orphaned childhood and his education in France, England,and eventually at Columbia University. He regarded himself as a trueman of his age, free of any moral laws beyond his own making, ready toransack and rob the world of all its pleasures and satisfactions. Butincreasingly his life struck him more as a story of pride and selshnessthat brought nothing but unhappiness to himself and others. What astrange thing! he wrote, In lling myself, I had emptied myself. Ingrasping things, I had lost everything. In devouring pleasures and joys,I had found distress and anguish and fear.

Out of this anguish and confusion, Merton found himself drawn bythe sense that there must be a deeper end and purpose to existence. Allaround him the world was tumbling toward World War II, the ulti-mate achievement of Contemporary Civilization. Meanwhile he wasreading Blake, St. Augustine, and medieval philosophy and beginning tosuspect that the only way to live was in a world that was charged withthe presence and reality of God.

It was a short leap from this insight to his reception in the Catholicchurch and ultimately to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. TheTrappists had captured his heart from the rst time he read about them inThe Catholic Encyclopedia.When he later made a retreat at Gethsemaniand there for the rst time viewed the silent monks, dressed in their whitehabits and kneeling in prayer in the chapel, he felt that he had found histrue home at last. This is the center of America, he exclaimed.

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6 MODERN SPIRITUAL MASTERS

With the publication of Mertons autobiography, he was suddenly themost famous monk in America. The irony was not lost on him. He hadbecome a Trappist in part to escape the claims of ego, the anxious desireto be somebody. And yet his superiors felt his writing had somethingto offer the world and they ordered him to keep at it. And so he did.Yet for all the books he would go on to produce, in the public mind hewas eternally xed at the point where his memoir ended as a youngmonk with his cowl pulled over his head, happily convinced that injoining an austere monastic community he had ed the modern world,never to return. It was difcult for readers to appreciate that this picturerepresented only the beginning of Mertons journey as a monk.

Over time he came to regret, in his youthful book, the attitude ofpious scorn directed at the world and its unfortunate citizens. He hadseemed to regard the monastery as a secluded haven set apart from thenews and desires and appetites and conicts that bedeviled ordinaryhumanity. Only with time did he realize that the monastery is not anescape from the world. On the contrary, by being in the monastery Itake my true part in all the struggles and sufferings of the world. Withthis realization his writing assumed an increasingly compassionate andecumenical tone.

In one of his published journals he described a moment of mysticalawareness that marked a critical turning point in his life as a monk.It occurred during an errand into nearby Louisville, at the corner ofFourth and Walnut in the center of the shopping district, when he wassuddenly overwhelmed with the realization that he loved all the peoplearound him. We could not be alien to one another even though wewere total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness,of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciationand supposed holiness.

Merton had discovered a sense of solidarity with the human race not simply in shared sin, but also in grace. There is no way of tellingpeople that they are all walking around shining like the sun, he wrote.There are no strangers! . . . The gate of heaven is everywhere.

This experience in Louisville turned out to be a crucial turning pointin his life. For years Merton had devoted creative thought to the meaningof monastic and contemplative life. But from this point on he becameincreasingly concerned with making connections between the monasteryand the wider world. Scorn and sarcasm gave way to compassion and


Thomas Merton 7

friendship. This was reected in his writing. Along with the more tradi-tional spiritual books there appeared articles on war, racism, and otherissues of the day. Long before such positions were commonplace in thechurch he was a prophetic voice for peace and nonviolence.

Ironically, this increasing engagement with the world and its prob-lems was accompanied by an increasing attraction to an even more totallife of contemplation. In 1961 he was given permission to move intoa hermitage on the monastery grounds. There he continued to perfectthe delicate balance between contemplative prayer and openness to theworld that had become the distinctive feature of his spirituality.

In 1968 his abbot allowed him to accept an invitation to address aninternational conference of Christian monks in Bangkok. Merton wasparticularly excited about the prospect of exploring his deep interestin Eastern spirituality. On December 10, after delivering his talk, heretired to his room for a shower and nap. There he was later founddead, apparently electrocuted by the faulty wiring of a fan.

Thomas Merton is not likely to be canonized. He lived out a model ofholiness that isnt easily pigeonholed in a prefab Catholic mold. And yetperhaps he represented a type of holiness particularly suited and neces-sary to our times. Responding to Gods call, he let go of his possessions,his ego, even a spurious kind of supposed holiness, until he came torest in Gods emptiness and compassion. It is a story of steadily puttingoff the old person and putting on Christ the same process to which allChristians are callednot for the sake of becoming a different person,but for the sake of becoming our true selves.

SOLITUDE

There is a silent self within us whose presence is disturbing preciselybecause it is so silent: it cant be spoken. It has to remain silent. Toarticulate it, to verbalize it, is to tamper with it, and in some ways todestroy it.Now let us frankly face the fact that our culture is one which is geared

in many ways to help us evade any need to face this inner, silent self. Welive in a state of constant semi-attention to the sound of voices, music,trafc, or the generalized noise of what goes on around us all the time.This keeps us immersed in a ood of racket and words, a diffuse mediumin which our consciousness is half diluted: we are not quite thinking,not entirely responding, but we are more or less there. We are not fully



present and not entirely absent; not fully withdrawn, yet not completelyavailable . . .We just oat along in the general noise.All of this can be described as noise, as commotion and jamming

which drown out the deep, secret, and insistent demands of the inner self.With this inner self we have to come to terms in silence. That is the

reason for choosing silence. In silence we face and admit the gap betweenthe depths of our being, which we consistently ignore, and the surfacewhich is untrue to our own reality. We recognize the need to be at homewith ourselves in order that we may go out to meet others, not just witha mask of affability, but with real commitment and authentic love.If we are afraid of being alone, afraid of silence, it is perhaps because

of our secret despair of inner reconciliation. If we have no hope of beingat peace with ourselves in our own personal loneliness and silence, wewill never be able to face ourselves at all: we will keep running and neverstop. And this ight from the self is . . . a ight from God. After all, it isin the depths of conscience that God speaks, and if we refuse to open upinside and look into those depths, we also refuse to confront the invisibleGod who is present within us. This refusal is a partial admission that wedo not want God to be God any more than we want ourselves to be ourtrue selves.Just as we have a supercial, external mask, which we put together

with words and actions that do not fully represent all that is in us, so evenbelievers deal with a God who is made up of words, feelings, reassuringslogans, and this is less the God of faith than the product of religious andsocial routine. Such a God can become a substitute for the truth ofthe invisible God of faith, and though this comforting image may seemreal to us, he is really a kind of idol. His chief function is to protect usagainst a deep encounter with our true inner self and with the true God.Silence is therefore important even in the life of faith and in our deep-

est encounter with God. We cannot always be talking, praying words,cajoling, reasoning, or keeping up a kind of devout background music.Much of our well-meant interior religious dialogue is, in fact, a smokescreen and an evasion. Much of it is simply self-reassurance and in theend it is little better than a form of self-justication. Instead of reallymeeting God in the nakedness of faith in which our inmost being is laidbare before him, we act out an inner ritual that has no function but toallay anxiety.The purest faith has to be tested by silence in which we listen for the

unexpected, in which we are open to what we do not yet know, and in


Thomas Merton 9

which we slowly and gradually prepare for the day when we will reachout to a new level of being with God. True hope is tested by silence inwhich we have to wait on the Lord in the obedience of unquestioningfaith . . .Faith demands the integrity of inner trust which produces wholeness,

unity, peace, genuine security. Here we see the creative power and fruit-fulness of silence. Not only does silence give us a chance to understandourselves better, to get a truer and more balanced perspective on ourown lives in relation to the lives of others: silence makes us whole if welet it. Silence helps draw together the scattered and dissipated energiesof a fragmented existence. It helps us to concentrate on a purpose thatreally corresponds not only to the deeper needs of our own being butalso to Gods intentions for us. Creative Silence, LL, 4043

Solitude is not withdrawal from ordinary life. It is not apart from, above,better than ordinary life; on the contrary, solitude is the very groundof ordinary life. It is the very ground of that simple, unpretentious, fullyhuman activity by which we quietly earn our daily living and share ourexperiences with a few intimate friends. But we must learn to know andaccept this ground of our being. To most people, though it is alwaysthere, it is unthinkable and unknown. Consequently, their life has nocenter and no foundation. It is dispersed in a pretense of togethernessin which there is no real meaning. Only when our activity proceeds outof the ground in which we have consented to be dissolved does it havethe divine fruitfulness of love and grace. Only then does it really reachothers in true communion. Often our need for others is not love at allbut only the need to be sustained in our illusions, even as we sustainothers in theirs. But when we have renounced these illusions, then wecan certainly go out to others in true compassion. It is in solitude thatillusions nally dissolve. But one must work hard to see that they do notreshape themselves in some worse form, peopling our solitude with devilsdisguised as angels of light. Love, simplicity, and compassion protect usagainst this. He who is truly alone nds in himself the heart of compas-sion with which to love not only this man or that but all men. He seesthem all in the One who is the Word of God, the perfect manifestationof Gods Love, Jesus Christ. Love and Solitude, LL, 2324

A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinkingabout how to live and begins to live. Thus, if one is called to be a solitary,



he will stop wondering how he is to live and start living peacefully onlywhen he is in solitude. But if one is not called to a solitary life, themore he is alone the more will he worry about living and forget to live.When we are not living up to our true vocation, thought deadens ourlife, or substitutes itself for life, or gives in to life so that our life drownsout our thinking and sties the voice of conscience. When we nd ourvocation thought and life are one.Suppose one has found completeness in his true vocation. Now every-

thing is in unity, in order, at peace. Now work no longer interferes withprayer or prayer with work. Now contemplation no longer needs to bea special state that removes one from the ordinary things going onaround him for God penetrates all. One does not have to think of givingan account of oneself to anyone but Him. TS, 85

CONTEMPLATION

Contemplation is the highest expression of mans intellectual and spir-itual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware thatit is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacrednessof life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness and for being. It isa vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from aninvisible, transcendent and innitely abundant Source. Contemplationis, above all, awareness of the reality of that Source . . .Contemplation is also the response to a call: a call from Him Who

has no voice, and yet Who speaks in everything that is, and Who, mostof all, speaks in the depths of our own being: for we ourselves are wordsof His. But we are words that are meant to respond to Him, to answerto Him, to echo Him, and even in some way to contain Him and signifyHim. Contemplation is this echo . . . It is as if in creating us God asked aquestion, and in awakening us to contemplation He answered the ques-tion, so that the contemplative is at the same time, question and answer.

NSC, 1, 3

THINGS IN THEIR IDENTITY

A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God meansit to be it is obeying Him. It consents, so to speak, to His creative love.It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct fromthe essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree.


Thomas Merton 11

The more a tree is like itself, the more it is like Him. If it tried to belike something else which it was never intended to be, it would be lesslike God and therefore it would give Him less glory.No two created beings are exactly alike. And their individuality is no

imperfection. On the contrary, the perfection of each created thing isnot merely in its conformity to an abstract type but in its own individualidentity with itself . . .Therefore each particular being, in its individuality, its concrete nature

and entity, with all its own characteristics and its private qualities andits own inviolable identity, gives glory to God by being precisely whatHe wants it to be here and now, in the circumstances ordained for it byHis Love and His innite Art.The forms and individual characters of living and growing things, of

inanimate beings, of animals and owers and all nature, constitute theirholiness in the sight of God . . .The pale owers of the dogwood outside this window are saints. The

little yellow owers that nobody notices on the edge of that road aresaints looking up into the face of God . . .The lakes hidden among the hills are saints, and the sea too is a saint

who praises God without interruption in her majestic dance.But what about you? What about me? . . .For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of

sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of nding out who I am andof discovering my true self.Trees and animals have no problem. God makes them what they are

without consulting them, and they are perfectly satised.With us it is different. God leaves us free to be whatever we like. We

can be ourselves or not, as we please. We are at liberty to be real, or tobe unreal. We may be true or false, the choice is ours. We may wear nowone mask and now another, and never, if we so desire, appear with ourown true face. But we cannot make these choices with impunity. Causeshave effects, and if we lie to ourselves and to others, then we cannotexpect to nd truth and reality whenever we happen to want them. Ifwe have chosen the way of falsity we must not be surprised that trutheludes us when we nally come to need it!

The seeds that are planted in my liberty at every moment, by Godswill, are the seeds of my own identity, my reality, my own happiness, myown sanctity.



To refuse them is to refuse everything; it is the refusal of my ownexistence and being: of my identity, my very self.Not to accept and love and do Gods will is to refuse the fullness of

my existence . . .All sin starts from the assumption that my false sense, the self that

exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality oflife to which everything else in the universe is ordered . . .The secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God.But whatever is in God is really identical with Him, for His innite

simplicity admits no division and no distinction. Therefore I cannot hopeto nd myself anywhere except in Him.Ultimately the only way that I can be myself is to become identied

with Him in Whom is hidden the reason and fulllment of my existence.Therefore there is only one problem on which all my existence, my

peace and my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God.If I nd Him I will nd myself and if I nd my true self I will nd Him.

NSC, 2936

THE PLASTER SAINT

A very wise piece of advice, which St. Benedict gives to monks in hisRule, is that they should not desire to be called saints before they areholy, but that they should rst become saints in order that their repu-tation for holiness may be based on reality. This brings out the greatdifference between real spiritual perfection and mans idea of perfec-tion. Or perhaps one might say, more accurately, the difference betweensanctity and narcissism . . .The stereotyped image [of the saint] is easy to sketch out here: it is

essentially an image without the slightest moral aw. The saint, if heever sinned at all, eventually became impeccable after a perfect con-version. Impeccability not being quite enough, he is raised beyond thefaintest possibility of feeling temptation . . .His words are always themost edifying clichs . . . They are without humor as they are withoutwonder, without feeling, and without interest in the common affairs ofmankind . . .Until we realize that before a man can become a saint he must rst of

all be a man in all the humanity and fragility of mans actual condition,we will never be able to understand the meaning of the word saint.Not only were all the saints perfectly human, not only did their sanctity


Thomas Merton 13

enrich and deepen their humanity, but the Holiest of all the Saints, theIncarnate Word, Jesus Christ, was himself the most deeply and perfectlyhuman being who ever lived on the face of the earth . . .Hence sanctity is not a matter of being less human, but more human

than other men. This implies a greater capacity for concern, for suffer-ing, for understanding, for sympathy, and also for humor, for joy, forappreciation of the good and beautiful things of life . . .The true saint is not one who has become convinced that he himself is

holy, but one who is overwhelmed by the realization that God, and Godalone, is holy. He is so awestruck with the reality of the divine holinessthat he begins to see it everywhere. LH, 2226

CHRIST AND THE WORLD

Whether or not a major war . . . should nally break, we have to live ina way that daily takes this possibility seriously into account.This implies certain important choices, certain preferences.Even though one may not be able to halt the race toward death, one

must nevertheless choose life, and the things that favor life. This meansrespect for every living thing, but especially for every man, made in theimage of God. Respect for man even in his blindness and in his confusion,even when he may do evil. For we must see that the meaning of man hasbeen totally changed by the Crucixion. Every man is Christ on theCross, whether he realizes it or not. But we, if we are Christians, mustlearn to realize it. That is what it means to be a Christian: not simplyone who believes certain reports about Christ, but one who lives in aconscious confrontation with Christ in himself and in other men.

CGB, 219

As usual, one comes back to the old question: what do you mean bythe world anyway? In this, I dont think an abstract answer makestoo much sense. My concrete answer is: what did I leave when I enteredthe monastery? As far as I can see, what I abandoned when I left theworld and came to the monastery was the understanding of myself thatI had developed in the context of civil societymy identication withwhat appeared to me to be its aims . . .Many of these were trivial, someof them were onerous, all are closely related. The image of a societythat is happy because it drinks Coca-Cola or Seagrams or both and isprotected by the bomb. The society that is imaged in the mass media



and in advertising, in the movies, in TV, in best-sellers, in current fads,in all the pompous and triing masks, with which it hides callousness,sensuality, hypocrisy, cruelty, and fear. Is this the world Yes. It is thesame wherever you have mass man . . .For my own part, I am by my whole life committed to a certain

protest and nonacquiescence, and that is why I am a monk. Yet I knowthat protest is not enough is perhaps meaningless. Yet that is alsowhy protest and nonacquiescence must extend to certain conceptions ofmonasticism which seem to me to be simply a fancy-dress adaptation ofwhat we are claiming we have renounced.As if, for instance, leaving the world were adequately summed up

by those pictures of the Trappist with his cowl over his head and hisback to the camera, looking at a lake. CGB, 4748

There is only one true ight from the world; it is not an escape from con-ict, anguish and suffering, but the ight from disunity and separation,to unity and peace in the love of other men.What is the world that Christ would not pray for, and of which He

said that His disciples were in it but not of it? The world is the unquietcity of those who live for themselves and are therefore divided against oneanother in a struggle that cannot end, for it will go on eternally in hell. Itis the city of those who are ghting for possession of limited things andfor the monopoly of goods and pleasures that cannot be shared by all.But if you try to escape from this world merely by leaving the city

and hiding yourself in solitude, you will only take the city with you intosolitude; and yet you can be entirely out of the world while remainingin the midst of it, if you let God set you free from your own selshnessand if you live for love alone.For the ight from the world is nothing else but the ight from self-

concern. And the man who locks himself up in private with his ownselshness has put himself into a position where the evil within him willeither possess him like a devil or drive him out of his head.That is why it is dangerous to go into solitude merely because you

like to be alone. NSC, 7879

LETTER TO A PEACEMAKER

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort ofwork you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have


Thomas Merton 15

to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and evenachieve no results at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you ex-pect. As you get used to this idea you start more and more to concentratenot on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the workitself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as graduallyyou struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specicpeople. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. Inthe end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.You are fed up with words, and I dont blame you. I am nauseated by

them sometimes. I am also, to tell the truth, nauseated with ideals andwith causes. This sounds like heresy, but I think you will understandwhat I mean. It is so easy to get engrossed with ideas and slogans andmyths that in the end one is left holding the bag, empty, with no traceof meaning left in it. And then the temptation is to yell louder than everin order to make the meaning be there again by magic . . .As for the big results, these are not in your hands or mine, but they

can suddenly happen, and we can share in them: but there is no point inbuilding our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied usand which after all is not that important.The next step in the process is for you to see that your own think-

ing about what you are doing is crucially important. You are probablystriving to build yourself an identity in your work and your witness. Youare using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against nothingness, anni-hilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that youwill do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowedyourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by Gods love. Think ofthis more and gradually you will be free from the need to prove your-self, and you can be more open to the power that will work through youwithout your knowing it.The great thing after all is to live, not to pour out your life in the

service of a myth: and we turn the best things into myths. If you canget free from the domination of causes and just serve Christs truth,you will be able to do more and will be less crushed by the inevitabledisappointments . . .The real hope, then, is not in something we think we can do, but in

God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannotsee. If we can do His will, we will be helping in this process. But we willnot necessarily know all about it beforehand.

Letter to Jim Forest, February 21, 1965, HGL, 29497



SHINING LIKE THE SUN

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of theshopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization thatI loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we couldnot be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It waslike waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation ina special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. Thewhole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. Not that I questionthe reality of my vocation, or of my monastic life: but the conception ofseparation from the world that we have in the monastery too easilypresents itself as a complete illusion: the illusion that by making vowswe have become a different species of being, pseudo-angels, spiritualmen, men of interior life, what have you . . .This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief

and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. And I suppose myhappiness could have taken form in the words: Thank God, thank Godthat I am like other men, that I am only a man among others. . . .It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is

a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terriblemistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a memberof the human race. A member of the human race! To think that such acommonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holdsthe winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake.I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which

God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of thehuman condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are.And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained.There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shininglike the sun.This changes nothing in the sense and value of my solitude, for it

is in fact the function of solitude to make one realize such things witha clarity that would be impossible to anyone completely immersed inthe other cares, the other illusions, and all the automatisms of a tightlycollective existence. My solitude, however, is not my own, for I see nowhow much it belongs to themand that I have a responsibility for it intheir regard, not just in my own. It is because I am one with them thatI owe it to them to be alone, and when I am alone they are not theybut my own self. There are no strangers!


Thomas Merton 17

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, thedepths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledgecan reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in Godseyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only wecould see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war,no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed . . . I suppose the bigproblem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. Butthis cannot be seen, only believed and understood by a peculiar gift.Again, that expression, le point vierge (I cannot translate it) comes

in here. At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which isuntouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or sparkwhich belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, fromwhich God disposes of our minds, which is inaccessible to the fantasiesof our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point ofnothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It isso to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, asour dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing withthe invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it wewould see these billions of points of light coming together in the faceand blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of lifevanish completely . . . I have no program for this seeing. It is only given.But the gate of heaven is everywhere. CGB, 15658

When I wrote [The Seven Storey Mountain] the fact uppermost in mymind was that I had seceded from the world of my time in all clarity andwith total freedom. The break and the secession were, to me, matters ofthe greatest importance. Hence the somewhat negative tone of so manyparts of this book.Since that time, I have learned, I believe, to look back into that world

with greater compassion, seeing those in it not as alien to myself, not aspeculiar and deluded strangers, but as identied with myself. In breakingfrom their world I have strangely broken from them. In freeing myselffrom their delusions and preoccupations I have identied myself, nonethe less, with their struggles and their blind, desperate hope of happiness.But precisely because I am identied with them, I must refuse all the

more denitively to make their delusions my own. I must refuse theirideology of matter, power, quantity, movement, activism, and force. Ireject this because I see it to be the source and the expression of thespiritual hell which man has made of his world: the hell which has burst



into ame in two total wars of incredible horror, the hell of spiritualemptiness and sub-human fury which has resulted in crimes like Ausch-witz and Hiroshima. This I can and must reject with all the power of mybeing. This all sane men seek to reject. But the question is: how can onesincerely reject the effect if he continues to embrace the cause?My conversion to the Christian faith, or to be precise, my conversion

to Christ, is something I have always regarded as a radical liberationfrom the delusions and obsessions of modern man and his society. I havealways believed and continue to believe that faith is the only real protec-tion against the absorption of freedom and intelligence in the crass andthoughtless servitude of mass society. Religious faith, and faith alone,can open the inner ground of mans being to the liberty of the sons ofGod, and preserve him from the surrender of his integrity to the seduc-tion of a totalitarian life . . .Man must believe in something and that inwhich he believes becomes his god. To serve some material or humanentity as ones god is to be a slave of that which perishes, and thus tobe a slave of death, sorrow, falsehood, misery. The only true liberty isin the service of that which is beyond all limits, beyond all denitions,beyond all human appreciation: that which is All . . .The monastery is not an escape from the world. On the contrary,

by being in the monastery I take my true part in all the struggles andsufferings of the world. To adopt a life that is essentially non-assertive,non-violent, a life of humility and peace is in itself a statement of onesposition. But each one in such a life can, by the personal modality of hisdecision, give his whole life a special orientation. It is my intention tomake my entire life a rejection of, a protest against the crimes and injus-tices of war and political tyranny which threaten to destroy the wholerace of man and the world with him. By my monastic life and vows I amsaying NO to all the concentration camps, the aerial bombardments, thestaged political trials, the judicial murders, the radical injustices, the eco-nomic tyrannies, and the whole socio-economic apparatus which seemsgeared for nothing but global destruction in spite of all its fair wordsin favor of peace. I make monastic silence a protest against the lies ofpoliticians, propagandists and agitators, and when I speak it is to denythat my faith and my Church can ever seriously be aligned with theseforces of injustice and destruction . . .If I say NO to all these secular forces, I also say YES to all that is good

in the world and in man. I say YES to all that is beautiful in nature, andin order that this may be the yes of freedom and not of subjection, I must


Thomas Merton 19

refuse to possess anything in the world purely as my own. I say YES toall the men and women who are my brothers and sisters in the world,but for this yes to be an assent of freedom and not of subjection, I mustlive so that no one of them may seem to belong to me, and that I maynot belong to any of them. It is because I want to be more to them thana friend that I become, to all of them, a stranger.

Preface to the Japanese edition ofThe Seven Storey Mountain (1963), HR, 4346

A LETTER ON THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE

Let us suppose the message of a so-called contemplative to a so-calledman of the world to be something like this:My dear Brother, rst of all, I apologize for addressing you when you

have not addressed me and have not really asked me anything. And Iapologize for being behind a high wall which you do not understand.This high wall is to you a problem, and perhaps it is also a problemto me, O my brother. Perhaps you ask me why I stay behind it out ofobedience? Perhaps you are no longer satised with the reply that ifI stay behind this wall I have quiet, recollection, tranquility of heart.Perhaps you ask me what right I have to all this peace and tranquilitywhen some sociologists have estimated that within the lifetime of ouryounger generations a private room will become an unheard-of luxury.I do not have a satisfactory answer . . . It is true that when I came to thismonastery where I am, I came in revolt against the meaningless confusionof a life in which there was so much activity, so muchmovement, so muchuseless talk, so much supercial and needless stimulation, that I couldnot remember who I was.But the fact remains that my ight from the world is not a reproach to

you who remain in the world, and I have no right to repudiate the worldin a purely negative fashion, because if I do that my ight will havetaken me not to truth and to God but to a private, though doubtlesspious illusion.Can I tell you that I have found answers to the questions that torment

the man of our time? I do not know if I have found answers. When I rstbecame a monk, yes, I was more sure of answers. But as I grow old inthe monastic life and advance further into solitude, I become aware thatI have only begun to seek the questions, And what are the questions?Can man make sense out of existence? Can man honestly give his life



meaning merely by adopting a certain set of explanations which pretendto tell him why the world began and where it will end, why there isevil and what is necessary for a good life? My brother, perhaps in mysolitude I have become as it were an explorer for you, a searcher inrealms which you are not able to visit except perhaps in the companyof your psychiatrist. I have been summoned to explore a desert area ofmans heart in which the explanations no longer sufce, and in whichone learns that only experience counts. An arid, rocky, dark land of thesoul, sometimes illuminated by strange res which men fear and peopledby specters which men studiously avoid except in their nightmares. Andin this area I have learned that one cannot truly know hope unless hehas found out how like despair hope is. The language of Christianityhas said this for centuries in other less naked terms. But the language ofChristianity has been so used and so misused that sometimes you distrustit: you do not know whether or not behind the word cross there standsthe experience ofmercy and salvation, or only the threat of punishment. Ifmy word means anything to you, I can say to you that I have experiencedthe cross to mean mercy and not cruelty, truth and not deception; that thenews of the truth and love of Jesus is indeed the true good news, but inour time it speaks out in strange places. And perhaps it speaks out in youmore than it does in me; perhaps Christ is nearer to you than he is to me.This I say without shame or guilt because I have learned to rejoice thatJesus is in the world in people who know Him not, that He is at work inthem when they think themselves far from Him, and it is my joy to tellyou to hope though you think that for you of all men hope is impossible.Hope not because you think you can be good, but because God lovesus irrespective of our merits and whatever is good in us comes from Hislove, not from our own doing. Hope because Jesus is with those whoare poor and outcast and perhaps despised even by those who shouldseek them and care for them more lovingly because they act in Godsname . . .No one on earth has reason to despair of Jesus, because Jesusloves man, loves him in his sin, and we too must love man in his sin . . .O my brother, the contemplative is not the man who has ery visions

of the cherubim carrying God on their imagined chariot, but simply hewho has risked his mind in the desert beyond language and beyond ideaswhere God is encountered in the nakedness of pure trust, that is to say inthe surrender of our own poverty and incompleteness in order no longerto clench our minds in a cramp upon themselves, as if thinking made usexist. The message of hope the contemplative offers you, then, Brother,


Thomas Merton 21

is not that you need to nd your way through the jungle of language andproblems that today surround God; but that whether you understand ornot, God loves you, is present to you, lives in you, dwells in you, callsyou, saves you, and offers you an understanding and light which are likenothing you ever found in books or heard in sermons. The contemplativehas nothing to tell you except to reassure you and say that if you dareto penetrate your own silence and dare to advance without fear into thesolitude of your own heart, and risk the sharing of that solitude with thelonely other who seeks God through you and with you, then you willtruly recover the light and the capacity to understand what is beyondwords and beyond explanations because it is too close to be explained:it is the intimate union in the depths of your own heart, of Gods spiritand your own secret inmost self, so that you and He are in all truth OneSpirit. I love you, in Christ . . .

Yours in Christ Jesus,Br. M. Louis

(Thomas Merton)MJ, 17073

PRAYER

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the roadahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I reallyknow myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does notmean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to pleaseyou does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I amdoing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And Iknow that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I mayknow nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I mayseem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are everwith me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. TS, 81

SOURCES

CGB Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, NY:Doubleday, 1966).

HGL The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Mertonon Religious Experience and Social Concerns, ed. William H.Shannon (New York: Farrar, Strasus & Giroux, 1985).



HR Honorable Reader: Reections on My Work, ed. RobertDaggy (New York: Crossroad, 1991).

LH Life and Holiness (New York: Herder, 1963).

LL Love and Living, ed. Naomi Burton Stone and BrotherPatrick Hart (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1979).

MJ The Monastic Journey, ed. Brother Patrick Hart (Kansas City:Sheed Andrews and McMeel, Inc., 1977).

NSC New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions,1961).

TS Thoughts in Solitude (New York: Farrar Straus, 1958).

See also: Thomas Merton: Essential Writings, ed. Christine Bochen(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000).

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